#FoundersOnFire Alumni NewsFlash

Seven Trailblazers taking AI, connectivity and enterprise innovation further

A major networking product launch, a Southeast Asian AI partnership, new infrastructure technology and fresh research: plus your chance to help choose our 2026 winners.

Another week, another seven reasons to celebrate the incredible innovation coming out of the Tech Trailblazers alumni community.

The team here at Tech Trailblazers Towers has been keeping a close eye on the latest announcements, and this week’s selection takes us from long-range IoT connectivity and AI infrastructure to developer tools, application security research and secure connectivity for autonomous systems.

What is particularly pleasing is the mix of former winners, runners-up and shortlisted companies. Not everyone takes home a trophy, but there’s certainly no shortage of Trailblazing talent among those who have made our shortlists over the years.

Here are seven alumni stories that caught our attention between 30 October and 6 November 2026.

Morse Micro helps bring long-range Wi-Fi to MikroTik customers

2023 Internet of Things Trailblazers: Shortlisted

Let’s start with something wonderfully practical.

Morse Micro has announced that MikroTik’s first Wi-Fi HaLow product, the KNOT Gateway HL9, is now available to purchase.

Powered by Morse Micro’s MM6108 system-on-chip, the outdoor gateway combines long-range Wi-Fi HaLow with LTE connectivity, GPS and an IP66-rated enclosure.

The applications are easy to imagine: industrial sites, agriculture, smart cities and locations where traditional Wi-Fi simply cannot provide the coverage required.

There’s another piece of positive news, too. Earlier in the week, Morse Micro announced that it had joined the EDGE AI FOUNDATION as a strategic partner, supporting the growing ecosystem around connected AI devices.

For a company shortlisted in our Internet of Things category in 2023, seeing its technology powering a commercial networking product from an established manufacturer is exactly the sort of progress we love to celebrate.

Congratulations to everyone at Morse Micro!

Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2023 Internet of Things Trailblazers shortlisted entrant.

News sources: Morse Micro, 5 November: MikroTik product announcement | Morse Micro, 3 November: EDGE AI FOUNDATION partnership

Kneron expands its AI ambitions across Southeast Asia

2021 AI Trailblazers: Runner-up

There’s significant international partnership news for Kneron.

The company has announced an expanded strategic partnership with Indonesian business group Sinar Mas, combining Kneron’s neural processing unit technology and AI inference platforms with an extensive network of businesses across eight industries.

The two organisations will explore opportunities in intelligent manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services, smart infrastructure and enterprise AI.

They are also looking at sovereign AI infrastructure: an increasingly important subject for organisations seeking greater control over where their data is processed and how their AI systems operate.

Indonesia will be the initial focus, with wider opportunities across Southeast Asia.

Kneron was a runner-up in our 2021 AI Trailblazers Awards, well before many of today’s conversations around efficient, local AI inference had become mainstream.

It’s great to see that expertise opening doors to new markets and commercial applications.

Huge congratulations to Kneron!

Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2021 AI Trailblazers runner-up.

News sources: EEHerald, 4 November | Kneron announcement, 4 November

Buoyant launches Kinference to bring AI inference under control

2021 Containers Trailblazers: Winner

Running AI models is one challenge. Running them reliably, economically and across an enterprise’s infrastructure is quite another.

Buoyant, the winner of our 2021 Containers Trailblazers Award, has announced the general availability of Kinference, an open-source inference control plane for Kubernetes.

Built on the vLLM inference engine, Kinference is designed to help organisations manage self-hosted AI inference across different models, GPUs and machines.

It also introduces capabilities around governance, routing and usage visibility, including the ability to attribute GPU consumption and costs to individual teams or tenants.

That’s an interesting next chapter for a company best known for creating Linkerd, the service mesh project.

Speaking of Linkerd, Buoyant and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation have also announced a new documentary celebrating the project’s history and community, with a premiere planned for KubeCon on 9 November.

From service mesh to enterprise AI infrastructure, that’s quite a Trailblazing journey.

Congratulations to Buoyant and its team!

Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2021 Containers Trailblazers winner.

News sources: PRWeb, 4 November: Kinference launch | CNCF, 2 November: Linkerd documentary

LinearB gives coding agents the context they need

2023 Developer Trailblazers: Runner-up

AI is writing more code than ever. But does producing more code automatically mean delivering better software?

LinearB is addressing that question with the launch of Agentic Studio, a new part of its developer productivity platform.

Announced on 2 November, Agentic Studio is designed to turn information from across the software delivery process into useful context for engineering leaders and AI coding agents.

Managers can ask questions about bottlenecks, delivery performance and the impact of AI tools. Coding agents can use relevant information about code ownership, incidents and risk to make better-informed decisions.

LinearB’s accompanying research, based on millions of pull requests, also highlights the growing pressure that AI-generated code can place on review and delivery processes.

The company was a runner-up in our 2023 Developer Trailblazers Awards, and this latest launch shows just how quickly the developer tooling landscape is changing.

It’s especially encouraging to see technology aimed not merely at making software faster to write, but at helping teams deliver it more effectively.

Well done, LinearB!

Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2023 Developer Trailblazers runner-up.

News sources: The Next Web, 2 November | ITBrief, 3 November

FalkorDB reveals what individual AI-agent security scanners can miss

2024 Firestarter Trailblazers: Runner-up

Sometimes the most interesting news isn’t a launch. It’s research that makes people think differently about a problem.

FalkorDB has published findings from its October Graph Hacks hackathon, focusing on security risks that arise when multiple AI agents interact.

The event attracted 7,899 developers and 1,213 project submissions, according to the company.

In one reported test, two security scanners examining agents individually missed 97 and 98 attack paths respectively, out of a total of 174. A graph-based query, which examined relationships and hand-offs between agents, identified all 174 in that test.

These are findings from FalkorDB’s own reported experiment, rather than independently validated benchmarks, but the underlying question is important.

As enterprise AI systems become increasingly connected, could some of their greatest vulnerabilities exist in the relationships between agents rather than within the agents themselves?

FalkorDB was a runner-up in our 2024 Firestarter Trailblazers Awards.

We love seeing alumni contribute original technical thinking to emerging enterprise challenges.

Congratulations to the FalkorDB team!

Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2024 Firestarter Trailblazers runner-up.

News source: FalkorDB research, 4 November

Lightrun helps AI agents investigate incidents after the fact

2021 Developer Trailblazers: Shortlisted

Anyone who has spent time troubleshooting an intermittent software issue knows how frustrating it can be when the problem disappears just as someone starts investigating it.

Lightrun has introduced a new Runtime History capability in its 4 November software release.

The feature enables AI agents to examine application snapshots that have already been captured, rather than always having to recreate an issue before beginning their investigation.

Through Lightrun’s Model Context Protocol tools, agents can search previous snapshot hits and retrieve captured values and stack traces to help diagnose application behaviour.

For developers dealing with hard-to-reproduce production issues, that could be a valuable addition to the debugging toolkit.

Lightrun was shortlisted in our 2021 Developer Trailblazers category, and it’s great to see another former shortlisted company continuing to advance the tools available to engineering teams.

Congratulations, Lightrun!

Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2021 Developer Trailblazers shortlisted entrant.

News source: Lightrun product update, 4 November

Atsign launches EdgeAI to connect autonomous systems securely

2024 and 2025 Networking Trailblazers winner

And finally, a new launch from a two-time Networking Trailblazers winner.

Atsign announced EdgeAI on 3 November, bringing secure connectivity and centralised control to distributed AI agents, applications and connected devices. Its applications include robotics, smart transportation, IoT and critical infrastructure.

The solution combines endpoint software with Atsign Control Center. Teams can manage which systems communicate and use an identity-based Kill Switch to restrict or revoke communications from compromised devices or agents.

Communications are encrypted end to end, while protected systems can connect without opening inbound listening ports. The aim is to make deployments across different sites simpler and reduce exposed infrastructure.

The launch also highlights work with Intel. Atsign reports encryption throughput improvements of up to 88x on Intel Xeon processors and 60x on Intel Core Ultra processors against software-only baselines. These are specific test results, rather than a measure of overall application speed.

Atsign won our Networking Trailblazers Award in both 2024 and 2025. It’s great to see the team continuing to tackle practical challenges in connecting and controlling enterprise technology.

Congratulations to everyone at Atsign!

Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2024 Networking winner | 2025 Networking winner

News sources: Atsign EdgeAI launch, 3 November | Full announcement on GlobeNewswire

Once a Trailblazer, always a Trailblazer

Seven stories, and seven rather different examples of how innovation continues after an Awards appearance.

A former shortlisted IoT company is powering a commercial networking product. An AI runner-up is expanding its reach in Southeast Asia. A Containers winner is helping enterprises run AI workloads more efficiently. Meanwhile, our Developer and Firestarter alumni are tackling some of the toughest questions around agentic AI and software engineering.

Here at Tech Trailblazers, we’re proud to celebrate these milestones and the remarkable progress of our alumni community.

We congratulate all of our previous Tech Trailblazers Awards winners, runners-up and shortlisted entrants who continue to innovate, grow and blaze trails around the world.

If your company has previously been recognised by Tech Trailblazers and has news worth sharing, we’d love to hear from you. Send us your launches, investment announcements, partnerships, customer successes and other milestones at innovate@techtrailblazers.com for possible inclusion in a future NewsFlash.

Could you help choose our next Tech Trailblazers?

There’s another exciting opportunity we’d love to share.

Entries for the 2026 Tech Trailblazers Awards are now closed, and the search for our next generation of winners is under way.

Our international judging panel is reviewing this year’s entries, and we’re currently recruiting experienced enterprise technology professionals to join our Secret Judging Panel.

We’re especially interested in hearing from CIOs, CISOs and other senior IT decision-makers who understand the technologies, challenges and opportunities facing enterprise customers.

Once the shortlist is announced, our secret judges will have the opportunity to add their expert perspective and help identify the innovations most deserving of recognition.

Fancy being part of the panel? We’d love to hear from you.

Submit your interest in becoming a Secret Judge

You can also read more about our search for the 2026 Tech Trailblazers and keep up with future Awards opportunities at TechTrailblazers.com.

Keep blazing those trails!

Rose Ross
Chief Trailblazer & Founder
Tech Trailblazers Awards