Buf

Buf is an infrastructure software company founded in 2019 that develops tools for Protocol Buffers, API lifecycle management and schema governance. Its platform helps engineering teams define, distribute and maintain service interfaces as type-safe contracts across distributed software systems. The company serves enterprise software, cloud infrastructure and developer tooling markets, with a corporate base in Buffalo and operational hubs in Toronto and San Francisco.

The company's approach centers on schema-driven development: treating API definitions as shared contracts that can be checked, versioned and distributed across teams. Its tools address the practical challenges of maintaining compatibility as services evolve, coordinating dependencies and generating consistent client libraries across programming languages.

Developer tools and schema infrastructure

Buf CLI combines Protobuf compilation, formatting, linting, breaking change detection and code generation in a single command-line tool. Developers can compare schema changes against version control branches and identify compatibility problems before those changes reach other teams. The toolchain also supports local code generation without requiring locally configured runtime dependencies.

Buf Schema Registry, or BSR, provides managed infrastructure for storing and distributing Protobuf schemas. It functions as a package manager for APIs, supporting centralized schema discovery, dependency management, automated compilation and language-specific SDK generation. Enterprise capabilities include single sign-on, role-based access control and policy enforcement for organizations managing interfaces across microservices architectures.

Open-source development

Buf also develops and maintains libraries that extend its schema-focused approach into application development. ConnectRPC provides lightweight libraries for gRPC-compatible communication across browsers and HTTP protocols. Protovalidate supplies cross-language validation for Protobuf messages, while Protobuf-ES and Protobuf-Py support language-specific development workflows.

Together, these tools connect API definition, compatibility checking, distribution, code generation and message validation. Their shared focus is helping software teams manage interfaces throughout the development lifecycle, from creating a schema to maintaining the applications and services that depend on it.