Cerulion

Active

Open source operating system for robots

Summer 2024Founded 20242 peopleSan Francisco, CA, USA

www.cerulion.com ↗LinkedIn ↗X ↗See on the Idea Map B2B momentum

About

Cerulion is an open source operating system for robots built by 2 MIT robotics PhDs. Companies like Amazon Robotics and Boston Dynamics AI Institute are using us to develop faster and ship more reliable robots than with ROS. With up to 1000x improvements in communications performance over state of the art, Cerulion is enabling the next generation of embodied AI.

From their website

as of Jun 7, 2026www.cerulion.com ↗

SaaS

Cerulion is a high-performance robot middleware built in Rust that provides zero-copy, deterministic IPC over shared memory for real-time robotics, offering a faster alternative to ROS2 while remaining ROS2-compatible.

Cerulion uses iceoryx2 shared memory to enable zero-copy, deterministic inter-process communication for ROS2 message types. It runs each node in its own process, supports native ROS2 messages, and provides a deterministic execution order with backpressure to prevent dropped frames. The system targets microsecond-scale latencies with replayable, bit-for-bit identical debugging, and offers a one-line Linux installation with ROS2-compatible workflows and live benchmarking capabilities.

Who it’s for: Robotics teams and production engineers needing real-time, deterministic, low-latency middleware for robot perception, control, and dataflow; teams already using ROS2 and seeking faster, more predictable IPC on single machines.

Features

zero-copy shared memory transport
deterministic, microsecond latency
ROS2 compatibility and native message support
bit-for-bit replay and deterministic debugging
backpressure to prevent dropped frames
per-node process isolation for fault containment
live benchmarks and one-line Linux installation

Backed by Y Combinator; mentions of demo bookings and engineering team imply early traction and growth support

Founders · 1

Lakshay SharmaFounder/CEO

MIT

UPenn🎓 University of Pennsylvania

Lakshay is the cofounder/CEO of robotics middleware startup Cerulion. Prior to this, he studied computer engineering, astrophysics and robotics at the University of Pennsylvania, and researched robot motion planners at MIT.

LinkedIn ↗X ↗

Launch

Launched on Y Combinator · Sep 2024

View launch post ↗

Cerulion enables lightning-fast, rock-solid communications for safe robots with an easy, cross-platform GUI.

Cerulion provides an application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that offers a cross-platform GUI and Rust-based networking for robot tooling, aiming to reduce development time and improve reliable communication in robot systems. It targets robotics developers needing fast, observable, and deterministic inter-process communication to streamline tooling and field operation.