Our vision is an open-source ecosystem of cooperatively owned and governed distributed organizations running on reliable distributed systems.
Distributed software systems are the foundation for many critical systems in our society; financial services, transport, healthcare, cloud services, and more. Building and maintaining them is difficult, expensive, and error-prone. We’re applying state of the art techniques in formal verification to make distributed systems more verifiable by obtaining mathematical guarantees of correctness. We help teams verify and gain confidence in the systems they design, implement, and maintain.
Globally distributed organizations have become increasingly fundamental to business, though building and maintaining them is difficult, expensive, and error-prone. We’re applying open-source, plaintext, and version control philosophies to develop tools to better manage the complexities of human organizations. We help teams reduce their operating and administrative overhead, making their organizations more verifiable and compliant.
Informal is developing a Verification Driven Development framework to integrate formal verification techniques into the software development process, promoting greater confidence in system correctness. We’re developing an alternative model checker to the popular TLA+ specification language, called Apalache, that scales to larger systems and significantly reduces verification times.
Informal believes in the power and potential of blockchain technologies, like the Cosmos Network, to create more sustainable and democratic economies. We are a leading contributor to the Tendermint and Cosmos projects, currently focused on formally specifying and verifying protocols and implementing them in Rust.
Informal is building a new kind of organization and tools for managing it. We’re cooperatively owned and governed by our employees. Our goal is to create a new model of technology company with long-term economic alignment for both employees and investors without targeting a singular exit event. We’re building tools to help developer-entrepreneurs manage their corporate state and processes like they manage their code, reducing barriers to entrepreneurship.
Approach the world with open curiosity
Research, experiment, measure, validate
Balance planning and improvisation
Psychological safety first
Help others help you, recursively
Responsibility is for the taking
Push boundaries, raise the bar
© 2020 Informal Systems Inc. All rights reserved.
