Founders
Founded for frontier engineering.
Ali Abrar and Ryan Trinkle met as roommates at Harvard Law and founded Obsidian in 2014 on a single conviction: the right foundations don't just make a team faster, they expand the bounds of what is possible.
The thesis, proven
At the startups Ali and Ryan led before Obsidian, the right tools and the right discipline turned struggling products into shipped ones, with less code and fewer bugs. Obsidian was founded to make that result repeatable across every domain we work in.
What we have built
Since 2014, Obsidian has grown from startup turnarounds into the engineering partner behind regulated capital-markets infrastructure on Canton, frontier AI-safety research, institutional platform and Nix work, and open-source ecosystems much of the field depends on, from Reflex and Obelisk to core Canton software.
The bets behind the firm
Obsidian made early, long-horizon commitments to Haskell, to Nix, and to Canton, well before any of them was the obvious choice. Those commitments are why the firm can take on regulated, correctness-critical systems that conventional approaches stall on.
Have a system that needs senior ownership?
Talk to the team that built Obsidian around that standard.