Linux Foundation Launches BUILD Foundation for the Bazel Ecosystem With ASML, Canva, Datadog, EngFlow, Figma and Spotify as Initial Members
The Linux Foundation says the BUILD Foundation is operational as of October 14, 2026, with six initial members and funding priorities for Bazel maintainers, documentation and supply chain security.
Overview
The Linux Foundation announced the operational launch of the BUILD Foundation in a press release dated October 14, 2026, from Amsterdam and BazelCon. The initial members listed are ASML, Canva, Datadog, EngFlow, Figma and Spotify. The release says the foundation is meant to give the Bazel ecosystem “the leadership and sustained investment needed to take on challenges no single organization can solve alone.”
This article rests mainly on the Linux Foundation’s own release, which is the announcing party. The member quotes below are the companies’ statements as published in that release.
What the Release Says
- Background. According to the Linux Foundation, Bazel was originally open sourced by Google in 2015 and is now used at scale by thousands of companies in sectors such as automotive, enterprise software and finance.
- Ecosystem. The release says the Bazel Central Registry distributes maintainership of language rulesets, libraries and tooling, and that the BUILD Foundation aims to formalize common industry investment in that ecosystem.
- Purpose. Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, is quoted as saying Bazel “has become critical infrastructure for engineering teams around the world” and that the foundation “provides a neutral home where organizations can invest together in its maintainers, security and long-term sustainability.”
- Initial priorities. The release says first investments will target top challenges from the 2025 Bazel User Survey Results. The listed priorities are dedicated technical writing for documentation, funding maintainers for bazel-contrib repositories, training and certification programs, better IDE integration, and stronger supply chain security through release attestations in the Bazel Central Registry.
- Membership. The release points organizations interested in joining to buildfoundation.dev.
Member Statements
Emil Waijers, Principal Engineer at ASML, is quoted as saying ASML relies on Bazel alongside several other build systems. He describes the foundation as a way to move “from being a user to being a partner” and to help “set direction for build engineering across many open source projects, not only Bazel.” The release’s title likewise refers to multi-language build and test systems rather than naming Bazel alone.
Helen Altshuler, CEO and co-founder of EngFlow, says in the release that she worked on Bazel at Google and co-created the first BazelCon in 2017, when she says Bazel had users at hundreds of companies and no place for them to set priorities together. She describes the foundation as that place.
Datadog, Canva, Figma and Spotify are also quoted in the release, each describing their own use of Bazel or build tooling.
Governance Context
The Bazel project’s own policy page, as read on October 15, 2026, opens by saying the Bazel project “is led and managed by Google”. The Linux Foundation release, as read the same day, does not say whether that arrangement changes, nor how the BUILD Foundation’s decisions will relate to the Bazel project’s owners.
What We Don’t Know
- The release does not state membership fees, budget size, or how much money members have committed.
- It does not describe the foundation’s board, technical oversight, or which projects beyond Bazel, if any, it will host. ASML’s quote refers to other open source projects, but the release text does not list them.
- It does not give timelines for the training and certification programs or the release attestations in the Bazel Central Registry.
- No independent coverage of the launch was reviewed for this article, so the account of the foundation’s scope and goals comes from the Linux Foundation and its members.