is for Ark
A collection of companies driving the next generation of cloud-native infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and edge platforms.
As we wrote in our founding principles, “Ark is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.”
As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the engineering resources we have.
We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Today, mission-critical infrastructure running on Kubernetes, GitOps automation, and declarative platform engineering power teams across Europe and globally. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still tackling problems others find daunting, but that we are super excited about.
We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary architectural shifts drive the next big leaps, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.
Our core engineering operations are running exceptionally well today, but we think we can make our entire ecosystem cleaner, faster, and more accountable. So we have structured our operations under a unified parent company: Ark (ark.in).
What is Ark? Ark is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is our core Cloud-Native & Kubernetes Platform practice: Arakaki Platforms. The companies and ventures that operate in specialized domains—from autonomous AI orchestration and zero-trust security to low-latency edge networks and deep R&D moonshots—are contained under Ark as independent brands.
Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren't very related. Ark is about businesses prospering through strong autonomous leaders and sharp operational focus. Sergey and Larry proved this holding model at Alphabet; we are bringing that same structural rigor to the cloud, AI, and enterprise platform frontier.
Why the name Ark? In technology, as in navigation, an Ark is built to weather the fiercest architectural storms, carry essential innovations across uncharted frontiers, and safeguard the foundational systems of the digital age.
Ark also incubates new efforts through our Ark Labs, which incubates next-generation systems software, and our Ventures arm, which backs promising founders building in the cloud-native, open-source, and systems software ecosystem.
We are not intending for Ark to be a single generic corporate brand with uniform products—the whole point is that Ark companies should have operational independence and develop their own distinct brands, engineering cultures, and industry leadership.
We are excited about…
- Getting more ambitious engineering done.
- Taking the long-term, multi-decade architectural view.
- Empowering great engineers, leaders, and autonomous teams to flourish.
- Investing at the scale of the opportunities and resources we see.
- Improving governance, operational oversight, and transparency.
- Making core Kubernetes and cloud platforms even better through focused excellence.
- And hopefully… as a result of all this, building resilient systems that solve critical problems worldwide.
What could be better? No wonder we are excited to get to work with everyone in the Ark family of companies. Don’t worry, we’re still getting used to the name too!
