Five infrastructure projects launched in alpha over the past few weeks, each one aimed at a separate segment of the software market. Taken together, they make a useful sample. They show where demand is shifting, where incumbents are entrenched, and where a small entrant still has room. The projects are AltSql, VPN Works, Precomputing, Preconfiguration and BareProxy; all five will be shown at Cloudflare Connect 2026, October 19–21 at Moscone West, San Francisco.
None has paying customers or production deployments yet. This is a read on the markets they’ve chosen, not on revenue.
Segment 1: data at the edge
The product. AltSql stores device data as compact records (the core is about 15 KB of code) and serves the identical records to SQL on the gateway. Its claim is the removal of the conversion layer between device and gateway. Details sit on the How It Works page, extensions on the AltSql modules page, and the live demos run in a browser.
Demand drivers. Connected devices are being asked to act locally: less cloud round-tripping, tighter bandwidth, longer offline stretches. Each of those pushes storage and logic toward the device.
Competition. SQLite is the default and hard to displace. Above it, time-series databases and cloud IoT suites compete for the gateway tier.
Barriers. Long hardware qualification cycles and conservative buyers. AltSql has so far run only on simulated hardware.
Segment 2: security for AI agents
The product. VPN Works confines a single program, typically a coding agent, to its own network path, with each connection checked against policy and logged. VPN Works Scope drafts least-privilege access rules for corporate VPNs from observed traffic. The live demo walks through a blocked token-leak attempt.
Demand drivers. Strong and current. In the same week, Apple added tighter controls on macOS Full Disk Access because of AI agents, and OpenAI disclosed that its agent had breached an Australian state government system. Agent containment is moving from research topic to procurement item.
Competition. Zero-trust networking vendors, endpoint security suites and the agent platforms themselves, all of which can bundle controls.
Barriers. Bundling. Standalone tools in security tend to win only where they become the developer’s first reflex.
Segment 3: observability and usage data costs
The product. Precomputing maintains dashboard and billing figures as events arrive, from a short policy compiled into standard SQLite. The policy language page documents it; the SQL demo processes three hours of simulated API traffic in the browser.
Demand drivers. Volume-based pricing for logs and metrics grows with every user a company adds, which keeps buyers looking for sampling, reduction and pre-aggregation.
Competition. Established observability platforms, stream processors and data warehouses with materialized views.
Market signal. Supabase’s agreement this week to acquire Turso, an agent-oriented database, points two ways: compact, embeddable databases attract buyers, and platforms prefer to acquire them rather than compete.
Segment 4: environments for coding agents
The product. Preconfiguration generates each coding-agent platform’s setup files from a single spec and verifies the result by running the project’s tests on a clean machine. Preconfig Doctor diagnoses failed setups from their logs with fixed rules. A live demo shows the full cycle.
Demand drivers. A young and fragmented segment. Cloud coding agents start on fresh machines, and each platform describes them in its own format; teams running several agents maintain several setups.
Competition. Mostly hand-written configuration today, plus whatever each platform ships for itself.
Barriers. Standardization. If the platforms settle on a shared format, the need for a translation layer shrinks.
Segment 5: web servers and reverse proxies
The product. BareProxy is a minimal web server and reverse proxy built so every routing decision can be explained, traced afterwards and previewed before a config change ships. Optional features come as BareProxy modules; the demo shows its core commands.
Demand drivers. Change safety. Misrouted traffic after a configuration update remains a common cause of outages.
Competition. Mature and concentrated: nginx, Caddy, Envoy and Traefik, with CDNs handling much of the edge.
Barriers. High. Differentiation rests on explainability, not features, and the product is days old.
Outlook
The five fall into three groups. Agent security and agent environments sit in segments that are growing quickly and still forming. Usage-data cost reduction addresses a steady, budget-driven need. Edge data and reverse proxies enter established markets with a narrow technical angle.
The common risk is maturity: no production customers across the set. The common advantage is low evaluation cost. Every product can be tried in a browser in minutes, which in early infrastructure sales often decides whether a second conversation happens at all.
