Plakar

Paris, September 2024: Julien Mangeard, former CTO of Veepee, and Gilles Chehade, creator of OpenSMTPD, founded Plakar as an open-source backup company. A 3 million dollar round followed in May 2025, backed by Olivier Pomel of Datadog and Solomon Hykes of Docker, and in January 2026 the project joined Linux Foundation et CNCF.

That sequence is the part worth watching. Chehade describes Plakar as an answer to decades of frustration with opaque, over-engineered backup tools, and frames the target as the missing standardised consensus around data protection, the role PostgreSQL and Git came to play in their own domains. He is explicit that replacing existing tools is not the goal.

The governance choices track his stated position on open source. Chehade argues that companies adopting open source as marketing inevitably disappoint communities, which detect the insincerity and respond with forks and abandonment. Plakar ships under the ISC licence, in the OpenBSD style, presented as a permanent commitment. The cryptography was audited externally by Jean-Philippe Aumasson in February 2025, who concluded the design was cryptographically sound. Foundation stewardship, a permissive licence and a published audit are all checkable by outsiders, which is the same argument the company makes about backups themselves.

The reception is lopsided. French coverage is enthusiastic, Korben writing that Plakar "atomise Restic et Borg", while Germany, the Netherlands and Japan have produced none.