We like to say that the most interesting thing about Datum isn’t what we’re building, but who we’re building it for:

  1. First, to help a new generation of builders gain access to the foundational components of the internet (we call them superpowers). While we aren’t sure what they’ll build, we’re excited to provide access using the tools and interfaces they love.
  2. Second, to help 1k new clouds thrive in this next era. In addition to enabling cost, performance and security benefits, we want to help them accelerate enterprise deals, remove customer friction, and turn internet foundations into innovation.

We believe this focus sets us apart from existing players in the market, but it is reinforced by what we’re building:

  • “Go Anywhere” Software - Builders are gonna build, new clouds are gonna scale, and they need to do stuff far beyond Datum’s boundaries. While we are committed to making the Datum experience “just work” on our managed infrastructure, we’re building core aspects of our cloud to run anywhere you need it: from your desktop or CI/CD pipeline, to thousands of retail stores, a private datacenter, or across the large public clouds (those commits aren’t going to spend themselves!).
  • A “Sits in the Middle” Network - In order for good things to happen, there needs to be a neutral place where connections can be made. But instead of the physical internet exchanges (IX) and “meet me rooms” (MMR) of the past, we’re working to move the activity up a few layers so that builders, apps, platforms, and agents that don’t have traditional network assets can also participate. That’s why we need a robust, global, network-focused infrastructure footprint.

Something we are not building is a content delivery network (CDN). Instead of optimizing for delivery to end users, we’re focused on making connections between participants. And while we expect to do plenty of traffic on our network, we’re far more interested in securely connecting the dots between an ecosystem of companies, networks, apps, agents, data, etc. Think of it like Plaid, but for alt clouds instead of banks. :-)

Here are some use cases we’re excited about:

  • Embedding connectivity into diverse environments, from cloud to local-first
  • Enabling private, secure interconnection between customers, clouds, and partners
  • Securing machine-to-machine (and agent-to-agent) experiences for agentic flows
  • Meeting complex privacy and regulatory rules with deterministic, policy-based routing
  • Integrating Internet scale networking into developer workflows (e.g. CI/CD, E2E testing)
  • Accelerating end customers with automated domain validation and SSL for SaaS apps