Linux Foundation Launches BUILD Foundation to Sustain Large-Scale, Multi-Language Build and Test Systems

New Foundation brings industry stakeholders together to fund Bazel maintainers, community development and critical ecosystem infrastructure

Summary

• The Linux Foundation launched the BUILD Foundation to provide the leadership and sustained investment needed to tackle the Bazel ecosystem's largest challenges, giving organizations that use Bazel a way to formally join and help direct that investment.
• Thousands of companies commercially depend on Bazel, driving the need for coordinated industry investment in critical maintainers, community rulesets, tooling and infrastructure.
• The Foundation will support ecosystem growth and long-term sustainability through improved documentation, training and certification, developer advocacy, stronger tooling integrations and software supply chain security.

AMSTERDAM – BazelCon – 14 Oct. 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the operational launch of the BUILD Foundation with initial members ASML, Canva, Datadog, EngFlow, Figma and Spotify. The Foundation gives the Bazel ecosystem the leadership and sustained investment needed to take on challenges no single organization can solve alone.

The BUILD Foundation launches at a point of inflection for the software industry's reliance on scalable build tooling. As engineering organizations grow, their ability to ship code depends on a build system that scales with them – developer velocity, infrastructure reliability, and the cost of build and test processes all require systems that can handle the increasing load. For a growing number of companies, that system is Bazel.

Originally open sourced by Google in 2015, Bazel is now used at scale by thousands of companies across sectors like automotive, enterprise software, finance, and more. As Bazel adoption has grown, so has the ecosystem around it. The Bazel Central Registry distributes maintainership of language rulesets, libraries, and tooling that compose a thriving landscape of shared build infrastructure. The BUILD Foundation brings together industry stakeholders to formalize that common investment and ensure the ecosystem's long-term viability, security, and independent development.

“Bazel has become critical infrastructure for engineering teams around the world,” said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation. “The BUILD Foundation provides a neutral home where organizations can invest together in its maintainers, security and long-term sustainability.”

Initial Foundation investments will target the top challenges identified in the 2025 Bazel User Survey Results. Key priorities include staffing dedicated technical writing for documentation, funding maintainers for bazel-contrib repositories, launching training and certification programs, improving IDE integration, and strengthening supply chain security through release attestations in the Bazel Central Registry.

Organizations interested in becoming Members of the BUILD Foundation can visit http://buildfoundation.dev/.

Supporting Quotes

“Building software at ASML's scale takes more than one tool. We rely on Bazel alongside several other build systems, and we have benefited for years from the open source communities behind them. The BUILD Foundation lets us move from being a user to being a partner: funding maintainers, improving documentation and tooling, and helping set direction for build engineering across many open source projects, not only Bazel. That is how critical open source infrastructure should be sustained.”

– Emil Waijers, Principal Engineer, ASML

"As AI has multiplied developer velocity at Datadog, Bazel remains central to ensuring our build/test times stay stable even as our codebases multiply in size. The BUILD Foundation will provide investment and direction in this vital ecosystem and we look forward to participating in its success, both for Datadog and the entire build at scale community."

– Mike Sherov, Senior Engineering Manager, Datadog

"When I worked on Bazel at Google and co-created the first BazelCon in 2017, Bazel had users at hundreds of companies and no place for them to set priorities together. The BUILD Foundation is that place, which is important for alignment of those who are deeply invested in Bazel. It brings leadership and investment in the experience, maintainability, and larger directional evolution of everything that surrounds Bazel and the build at scale ecosystem."

– Helen Altshuler, CEO and co-founder of EngFlow

"Bazel has helped Figma measurably improve our build and test times and engineering velocity. Bazel was one of the very few build systems that could give every Figma engineer fast, reliably correct, single-command builds and tests across TypeScript, C++, Rust, Go, Ruby, and Python, with one dependency graph shared between CI and developer environments."

– John Firebaugh, Software Engineer, Figma

“At Spotify, we invest significant resources in continuously improving iteration speed for all our engineers. Bazel, for example, has become foundational to how Spotify engineers efficiently build and test software across platforms and engineering disciplines. We’re excited to see the community come together through the BUILD Foundation to invest in solving common problems, provide long-term sustainability for those solutions, and help ensure the ecosystem continues to thrive for years to come.”

– Patrick Balestra, Staff Engineer in Platform Developer Experience, Spotify

Media Contact

The Linux Foundation
pr@linuxfoundation.org