Rust Foundation Launches Rust Innovation Lab with Rustls as Inaugural Project
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON – RustConf 2025 – September 3, 2025 – The Rust Foundation, the independent nonprofit organization dedicated to stewarding and supporting the Rust programming language and its global community, today announced the launch of the Rust Innovation Lab. This new program offers relevant and well-funded open source projects the opportunity to receive fiscal sponsorship from the Rust Foundation, including governance, legal, networking, marketing, and administrative support.
The creation of the Rust Innovation Lab comes at a pivotal moment: Rust adoption has accelerated across both industry and open source, and many projects written in Rust have matured into critical pieces of global software infrastructure. As Rust becomes more deeply embedded in everything from cloud platforms to embedded systems, there is a growing need for neutral, community-led governance and reliable institutional backing to ensure these projects remain secure, sustainable, and vendor-independent.
The inaugural hosted project under the Rust Innovation Lab is Rustls: a memory-safe, high-performance, and flexible TLS library. As demand grows for secure, memory-safe TLS in safety-critical environments, Rustls demonstrates Rust’s ability to deliver both security and performance in one of the most sensitive areas of modern software infrastructure.
Joseph Birr-Pixton, Founder of Rustls, said the following about Rustls’ decision to pursue hosting under the Rust Foundation’s Rust Innovation Lab:
“We are excited by the opportunities to sustain and support the long-term development and maintenance of Rustls as a part of the Rust Innovation Lab. We look forward to working with the Rust Foundation toward these goals.”
The Rust Foundation welcomes funded open-source projects curious about the new Rust Innovation Lab to learn more here.
In the past, Rustls has been supported by the Internet Security Research Group’s Prossimo project and the Sovereign Tech Agency. The Rust Foundation commends both organizations for supporting important open source projects like this one.
About the Rust Foundation
The Rust Foundation is an independent nonprofit dedicated to the safety, security, sustainability, and health of the Rust Programming language and the people who use it. Through close partnerships with organizations passionate about Rust and the growing Rust Project and community, the Rust Foundation is helping forge a better open source future with Rust.Visit the Rust Foundation website to learn more. Follow the Rust Foundation on Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
About the Rust Innovation Lab
The Rust Innovation Lab is the Rust Foundation’s new home for existing and developing open source projects seeking support, resources, and infrastructure to evolve and thrive—without compromising on their own ideas. Participating projects bring not only their vision but also the funding or sustainable financial model that will allow them to take full advantage of the Lab’s resources. Open source projects hosted by the Rust Foundation will receive governance, legal, networking, marketing, and administrative support in a neutral, nonprofit environment staffed by experts—maximizing the impact of both the project’s funding and the Foundation’s expertise. To learn more about the Rust Foundation’s Rust Innovation Lab, please visit https://rustfoundation.org/rust-innovation-lab
