Company
Cobalt Systems builds the transport layer underneath connected hardware — the unglamorous plumbing that takes a reading off a device and delivers it, intact and verifiable, to the systems that act on it. We started Cobalt because the gap between "the sensor said something" and "we can trust what the sensor said" was where every interesting failure lived.
Most telemetry stacks treat the wire as an afterthought: ship the bytes, hope they arrive, patch it up downstream. That works until you have ten thousand devices on flaky links and a dashboard that quietly drifts away from reality. We took the opposite stance. The frame is the contract. Every payload is masked on the device, carried over whatever transport is cheap and available, and checked the instant it lands. If a frame doesn't verify, it never reaches your application — full stop.
That single decision shapes everything we build. A wire format small enough to implement on a microcontroller. A masking step that costs almost nothing on constrained hardware. A trailing checksum that makes corruption obvious instead of subtle. And a developer console that runs the real decoder, so the behavior you read about is the behavior you can poke at with your own hands.
The team
We're engineers who got tired of debugging other people's wire formats, so we built one worth trusting. Everyone here writes code and talks to customers.
Careers
We hire people who care about the unglamorous correctness work: wire formats, integrity checks, SDK ergonomics, the stuff that has to be right a billion times a day. If reading a frame format spec for fun sounds like you, we should talk.