What Tarides does

Tarides is a privately held software company founded in 2018 and headquartered in Paris, with additional offices in Cambridge (UK) and Chennai (India) and a globally distributed remote workforce. The company sells OCaml expertise to organizations that build mission-critical systems, providing expert consulting and bespoke development, structured training courses, and recurring long-term support for OCaml infrastructure. Its customer base spans financial trading, defense and security, government research, blockchain infrastructure, and developer tooling, with marquee logos including Jane Street, Microsoft R&D, Thales, Tezos, Nomadic Labs, CEA, Semgrep, and CFA Institute.

At the technical core, Tarides maintains and develops foundational infrastructure for the OCaml ecosystem. Flagship open-source projects include Dune (the de facto OCaml build system), MirageOS (a library operating system that compiles applications into specialised unikernels for cloud and edge deployment), Irmin (a mergeable, branchable distributed data store), Multicore OCaml (the upstream extension enabling parallel execution across multiple cores), Eio (an effects-based direct-style I/O library for OCaml 5), Wasm_of_ocaml (a bytecode-to-WebAssembly compiler), odoc (the OCaml documentation generator), and OCurrent (an OCaml-native CI and workflow framework). Additional tooling extends to editor integrations (ocaml.nvim, ocaml-eglot), formal verification (Ortac/QCheck-STM), and migration utilities (ciao-lwt). The technical stack emphasises memory safety, strong static typing, type-driven correctness, and high-performance concurrent computing as alternatives to C, C++, and Rust in security-sensitive deployments.

Tarides monetises its maintainer position through three revenue streams: per-engagement consulting and custom development, fee-paying training programmes delivered by expert instructors, and recurring long-term support contracts on core OCaml tools. Go-to-market is hybrid: direct enterprise sales for bespoke engagements, supplemented by community-led demand generation through technical blog content, ICFP and OCaml Workshop presence, OCaml.org stewardship, and organic GitHub discovery. Pricing is custom-quoted with no public rate card, and the firm discloses no revenue, no external funding rounds, and no institutional investors in the available data.

Name

Tarides

Legal name

Tarides

Website

https://tarides.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

2018

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Tarides is a privately held Paris-based software company founded in 2018 that provides OCaml consulting, bespoke development, and training to enterprises building mission-critical systems. It also maintains core OCaml open-source infrastructure including Dune, MirageOS, Irmin, and Multicore OCaml.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Headquarters

HQ city

Paris

HQ country

France

HQ region

Europe

Offices3 records

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Services

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. Consulting & Custom Development Services: Tarides provides expert consulting and bespoke development services to organisations needing OCaml expertise, cybersecurity solutions, and open-source development support. Engagements include creating custom tools and libraries, improving and expanding existing codebases, and solving scalability, security, or performance problems in large-scale distributed systems.
2. Training Services: Tarides offers fee-paying training courses for teams, specialising in cybersecurity, OCaml, and functional programming. Courses are delivered by expert instructors with customisation options to suit client needs, providing a recurring training revenue stream.
3. Open Source Ecosystem Maintenance & Support: Through long-term support offerings on core OCaml tools and libraries (Dune, Irmin, MirageOS), Tarides generates revenue by providing commercial-grade support contracts to enterprises relying on OCaml infrastructure.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Tarides is an OCaml-focused software company that delivers expert consulting, bespoke development, and training services centered on the OCaml programming language and its ecosystem. The company provides custom tool and library creation, scalability and security problem-solving for distributed systems, and structured training courses in OCaml, functional programming, and cybersecurity. Tarides also maintains core open-source OCaml infrastructure projects including MirageOS, Irmin, Dune, and Multicore OCaml, offering long-term commercial support on these.

Product overview

Tarides offers OCaml expertise through consulting services and training, helping organizations build reliable, secure, and high-performance systems. The company's core offering centers on the OCaml open-source ecosystem, which they maintain and advance through multiple interconnected projects: MirageOS (library operating system for unikernels), Irmin (distributed data store), Dune (build system), Eio (effects-based I/O library), and Wasm_of_ocaml (WebAssembly compiler). Additional ecosystem tools include odoc (documentation generator), Ocsigen (web framework), OCurrent (CI infrastructure), Ortac/QCheck-STM (formal verification), ocaml.nvim and ocaml-eglot (editor plugins), and ciao-lwt (migration tool). Tarides maintains and develops these projects in collaboration with the OCaml community, offering commercial expertise, consulting, and training services around this ecosystem.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• OCaml Expertise and Consulting Expert consulting and bespoke development services for organizations needing OCaml expertise, including custom tool and library creation, improvement and expansion of existing OCaml projects, and solving scalability, security, and performance problems in large-scale distributed systems. Targeted at enterprise software teams.
• OCaml and Cybersecurity Training Fee-paying training courses delivered by expert instructors for engineering teams, specializing in cybersecurity, OCaml, and functional programming. Modules are customizable to suit team needs and are available on-site or remotely.
• Open Source Maintenance and Long-Term Support Commercial-grade long-term support contracts for core OCaml ecosystem tools and libraries, including Dune, Irmin, MirageOS, Multicore OCaml, and Merlin, provided to enterprises relying on OCaml infrastructure. Also includes assistance with open-sourcing and maintaining client projects.

Quantifiable outcome

• Jane Street processes billions of dollars in trades daily using OCaml, which Tarides helps advance
• +3 more outcomes

Named customers16 records

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Feature10 records

Scale indicators4 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Tweag: Functional programming consultancy specializing in Haskell and OCaml consulting, training, and open-source ecosystem contributions. Operates an almost identical GTM model (services + OSS stewardship) and serves overlapping customer profiles in finance and advanced technology.
• LexiFi: Builds pricing, risk management, and structured products software in OCaml for financial institutions. Closely comparable in OCaml-native technology stack, finance vertical focus, and emphasis on formal verification and high-assurance software.
• Well-Typed: Haskell consultancy offering training, development, and long-term support contracts analogous to Tarides' OCaml offering. Highly comparable services-led business model and ecosystem-stewardship positioning, just in the Haskell ecosystem.
• Nomadic Labs: R&D center building the Tezos blockchain protocol in OCaml, with deep expertise in language tooling and distributed systems. Direct customer of Tarides but also a parallel OCaml-native engineering organization competing for some of the same talent.
• Galois: High-assurance software consultancy applying formal methods and functional programming (including OCaml and Haskell) to defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure customers. Directly comparable in security-focused, correctness-driven consulting with similar government/defense buyer profiles.
• Formation: Fintech platform built primarily in OCaml serving financial institutions with personalized offers and customer engagement infrastructure. Comparable OCaml-native technology stack and financial services customer overlap, though product-oriented rather than services-oriented.

Broad incumbents

• OCaml Labs: University of Cambridge research lab driving core OCaml compiler and multicore research. While academic rather than commercial, it shapes the OCaml technology trajectory and produces much of the intellectual property Tarides commercializes.
• Jane Street: Quantitative trading firm that is the largest industrial OCaml employer globally and contributes heavily to the OCaml ecosystem (OxCaml, tooling). Not a consulting peer per se but a major buyer of OCaml services and the dominant competitor for senior OCaml talent.
• Docker: Major infrastructure software company that has used OCaml extensively in its tooling (presented at ICFP). Validates OCaml's applicability in mainstream infrastructure but is a customer/ecosystem participant rather than a services competitor.

Others

• Ahrefs: Search engine and SEO platform built largely on OCaml, demonstrating large-scale production use of the language. Not a peer in services or products but a high-profile ecosystem participant that reinforces OCaml's credibility for performance-critical systems.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/tarides_
• GitHubgithub.com/sponsors/tarides
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/tarides

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Tarides