Igalia

Ten engineers started the company in the Galician city of A Coruña in 2001, with no outside investors and no managers above them. The firm now employs close to two hundred people. It describes itself as an open source consultancy whose engineers build software for clients and contribute the same work back to the projects those clients depend on, and it says it is owned by the people who do that work.

Browser engines and the WPE WebKit port

Igalia says it has the most WebKit, WPE, Chromium and Firefox expertise found in consulting, with many contributors and committers on its staff. It is a key contributor to the web engines and often leads feature work in them. The firm also maintains WPE WebKit, the official WebKit port for embedded devices, which is used across industries from cable operators to consumer electronics makers, on tens of millions of devices worldwide.

The company also maintains Servo, the embeddable web rendering engine, and Wolvic, an XR browser that has passed store review and is available on Meta Quest headsets. For embedded customers it offers optimization of WPE WebKit so they can get the most from their hardware.

Multimedia, graphics and the Linux stack

The multimedia team includes many experienced GStreamer developers, and its work runs from hardware acceleration up to end-user applications. GStreamer carries Igalia's contributions to several layers of the software stack, from the kernel up to the application. The firm has spent a decade building fast user interfaces and middleware, and it works on graphics pipelines and rendering. It also consults on the Linux kernel for companies in a range of domains.

Compilers, virtual machines and cloud technology

The firm says it has deep JavaScript engine experience, with upstream contributions to V8, JavaScriptCore and SpiderMonkey. A team focused on hypervisors, system virtualization and cloud technologies has contributed to QEMU and Ceph. Embedded Linux and device driver work draws on years of experience in the lower layers of the Linux stack.

Who the work serves and how it reaches people

Cable operators and consumer electronics manufacturers are among its customers, and the devices they sell run WPE WebKit. Technical strategy and feasibility analysis sit alongside the development work. The firm also hosts the Web Engines Hackfest each year, and runs a Coding Experience Program that offers people their first professional experience in open source software development.