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
Adi is a Research Engineer focused on Distributed Systems at Informal. He likes understanding and building distributed systems, making them faster and more resilient. Despite knowing that time is an illusion, the goal of his life is to build things -- distributed systems, and not only -- that last.
Anca is a Software Engineer focused on Distributed Systems at Informal. She works on protocol specification and development. Besides blockchain technology, Anca likes skiing, swimming and painting.
Andrey is a Research Engineer focusing on developing practical verification methods and tools. He strives to make computer systems reliable by combining simplicity and elegance of design with bug-fixing through verification. Outside of work, Andrey enjoys reading and playing the trumpet.
Andy is a Developer Advocate and Software Engineer at Informal. He believes that creating successful ecosystems is a combination of getting the right people and groups working together in a cohesive and trusting way to benefit all the participants. He enjoys reading, photography, swimming and playing tennis.
Arianne is COO at Informal focusing on overseeing company operations and procedures. She believes that value should be shared among those who create it. Outside of work you'll find her practicing yoga, teaching math, and with her dog Millie.
Cezara is Principal Scientist at Informal. She is interested in increasing confidence in consensus solutions and in their impact. She uses formal methods to structure the thought process and make great things better.
Ethan is CEO at Informal. He sees consensus algorithms as a 21st century means for promoting social cohesion. He is driven to empower humans with new ways to coordinate and reach agreement at scale.
Greg is Infrastructure and Security Lead at Informal. He leads infrastructure projects that build tools and services for Informal and the Cosmos ecosystem. He believes that using IT infrastructure should be a seamless experience that enables customers to focus on their goals, instead of fighting the servers.
Igor is a Principal Scientist at Informal. He believes that computer-aided verification is up to the challenges of finding bugs in industrial consensus protocols and proving their correctness. Igor focuses on specification and verification of fault-tolerant distributed algorithms as well as improving the verification tools. Igor enjoys reading and riding hills on a bike or ski.
Jelena is Operations Manager at Informal Systems working to scale up company procedures and processes. She loves to read authors she disagrees with and enjoys taking her Nikon FE2 on long walks. She believes that the forthcoming decentralized digital world will be more beautiful and empowering than the last.
Josef is a Principal Scientist at Informal and focuses on fault-tolerant distributed protocols, their formal specification, and their automated verification. Josef believes in math and logic. He enjoys Yoga, all kinds of music, and being at the seaside.
Jure is a Verification Engineer at Informal, based in Vienna. As part of his doctoral work, he co-lead the design and development of the Apalache model checker for TLA+. He works on formal verification and analysis of distributed protocols and systems.
Mircea is an Infrastructure Engineer at Informal who works on operating networks for blockchain projects. Mircea is awesome at designing & implementing infrastructure solutions on many platforms and at breaking software. He is based in Toronto and when he's not coding, you can find him in Rocket League and other competitive video game scenes.
Romain is a Software Engineer focused on Distributed Systems at Informal. He uses formal methods and programming language theory to build correct and resilient software. He's a major contributor to the Stainless verification framework for Scala, and has co-authored a few popular crypto libraries in Rust. Based in Lausanne, Romain likes to spend time in the mountains, hiking, skiing and reading.
Shoaib is a Technical Project Lead at Informal. He has a background in embedded software development, and extensive experience with system programming and protocol development for blockchain light clients. He is an ardent proponent of free software and decentralization. Shoaib enjoys listening to Indian classical music, writing poetry (of the urdu ghazal genre) and reading research papers on distributed systems & threshold cryptography.
Shon is a Software Engineer at Informal working to empower distributed cooperative organizations. He loves encoding thought into being by expressing theories as programs and he believes that forming kinder communities is paramount.
Soares is a Rust engineer at Informal. He uses his knowledge in functional programming and programming language theory to build software that is correct and composable. Soares enjoys learning new things, and he is interested in research topics such as algebraic effects, session types, dependent types, formal methods, distributed systems, blockchains, and macroeconomics.
Thane is a Software Engineer, supporting and contributing to the development of plaintext tools at Informal. He believes that decentralization is one critical component of what makes a healthy society, and that distributed systems technology bolsters and supports that decentralization.
Zarko is Chief Scientist and leads research efforts at Informal. He believes that specification and implementation should be in love, and strongly encourages techies to garden.
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