The control plane for AI traffic, built to run on your own infrastructure.
Busbar is a single-binary AI control plane written in Rust: one fast, self-hosted process that speaks every major provider protocol, translates losslessly between them, and enforces your keys, budgets, and rate limits, all without your prompts or credentials ever leaving your network. We started Busbar because the tools in this space made you choose between performance, control, and simplicity. We did not think that trade was necessary.
What we are building
Every team wiring up more than one model runs into the same wall: provider APIs differ, keys sprawl, spend is hard to see, and the gateway you reach for to fix it becomes its own heavyweight dependency with a database and a runtime to babysit. Busbar is our answer to that: a control plane that adds microseconds, not milliseconds; ships as one static binary with nothing else to run out of the box; and stays fully under your control because it runs where your traffic already does. If you need more, like a shared store for cluster-wide governance, you add a signed plugin, not a second system.
We publish our own benchmarks on the same box as every competitor, and we help fund onthebench.ai, a neutral, reproducible benchmark of the self-hostable AI gateway space, Busbar among the entrants, so the numbers are something you can re-run yourself rather than take on faith.
The team
Matthew Jackson
Founder
Matthew is a career software engineer who spent years building performance-critical backend systems before starting Busbar. He started the project out of a conviction that an AI control plane should be measured in microseconds and owned by the team that runs it, and he still writes the code.
Advisors
Busbar is advised by engineers and operators from across the AI and infrastructure industry, people who have built and run the model providers, gateways, and large-scale systems that Busbar sits in front of. Their experience keeps us honest about what teams actually need in production, from wire-protocol edge cases to the realities of governing spend across a fleet.
Where we are
Busbar is an early-stage, pre-seed startup. The software is open source under the Apache-2.0 license and already runs in production; the company around it is deliberately small and focused on the product. That means you get direct access to the people building it: no support tier stands between you and an answer.