Second State is the company behind WasmEdge, a lightweight, high-performance WebAssembly runtime that is a CNCF sandbox project. WasmEdge is written in C++ and is optimized for server-side and edge use cases rather than the browser, with extensions for networking, database access, KV storage, and AI inference that go beyond the standard WASI specification.
WasmEdge can run Wasm modules ahead-of-time compiled via LLVM for near-native performance, embed directly into host applications via C, Go, Rust, Java, Python, and JavaScript SDKs, and plug into container runtimes: it integrates with containerd and CRI-O through the crun/youki OCI runtime as a Wasm runtime class, so Kubernetes can schedule Wasm workloads alongside Linux containers through RuntimeClass. Its proprietary extensions include a TLS-capable non-blocking socket API, a rustls/wasmedge_wasi_nn interface for running ONNX, PyTorch, TensorFlow Lite, and llama.cpp models from inside a Wasm module, and bindings for Redis, Postgres, and MySQL.
Typical workloads include serverless functions, service-mesh data-plane extensions (used in Istio’s proxy-wasm ecosystem), edge inference for LLMs, and SaaS plugin sandboxes. WasmEdge is Apache-2.0 licensed. Second State itself also builds developer tooling and a hosted LLM inference service on top of WasmEdge.