Inside RWX’s bid to reinvent how engineers build Docker containers

On Monday, Columbus-based startup RWX pulled back the curtain on a new kind of container builder. And the company insists this isn’t just another feature drop, but a reset of how Docker images get made.

Framed as the centerpiece of its “RWX Container Launch,” the team is touting it as the biggest leap in container build technology since Docker’s own BuildKit engine, which has quietly powered most production builds for more than seven years.

About RWX

RWX was founded in 2022 by Dan Manges and Tommy Graves with a simple question: where could they have the biggest impact on engineering productivity? Backed by a $7 million seed round led by Quiet, the team spent its early days exploring ideas, running experiments, and talking with engineering leaders at more than 100 companies.

RWX’s name is inspired from the Linux file permissions for read, write, and execute and was chosen as a metaphor for researching, publishing, and actually doing the work. Over time, the same theme kept resurfacing: build and test tooling. The well-known xkcd comic of developers waiting for code to compile first ran in 2007, and yet, for many teams, the day-to-day experience inside CI/CD pipelines doesn’t feel much better in 2025.

RWX’s new container builder is their latest answer to that problem, running on the same technology already powering pipelines for teams like Branch, Clarence Health, Empora, and Lower that feel every extra minute their pipeline adds before a change can ship.

Why it matters

Docker changed how applications are deployed. Containers bundle system dependencies with application code, providing a portable image that can run on any generically configured server. They’ve become the standard “shipping container” for software.

The hard part isn’t running containers. It’s building them, over and over, every time a developer pushes a change.

In a typical setup, a CI system pulls the latest code and hands it off to a container builder that steps through a Dockerfile, layer by layer. If caching is misconfigured, or a single step changes, the whole pipeline can bog down, leaving developers staring at long build times before even a simple change can run.

As RWX puts it, building container images today is often “painfully slow and inefficient.” That sluggishness doesn’t just waste cloud resources; it drags on human productivity and gets in the way of more ambitious ideas like agentic coding, where AI systems write and ship code on their own.

How RWX’s approach is different

RWX’s bet is that the capabilities that power their CI system will produce a meaningfully faster way of building containers.

Instead of treating image builds as a black box off to the side, RWX uses the same dependency graph it already maintains for tests and jobs to assemble Docker images directly. The platform knows which steps depend on which inputs, what’s changed since the last run and what can safely be reused.

That lets RWX:

• Run independent build steps in parallel across many machines instead of marching through a single linear Dockerfile.
• Reuse more work between builds by leaning on content-based caching rather than fragile hand-tuned Docker cache flags.
• Output standard OCI/Docker images that plug into the same registries and runtimes teams already trust.

The company says the result can be up to 10x faster than traditional builds, without forcing customers to rewrite their applications or rip out existing container infrastructure.

For developers, that translates into shorter feedback loops and less time nursing Dockerfiles. For leaders, it shows up as reclaimed engineering time and lower cloud spend. For teams leaning into AI-assisted development, RWX is framing this as foundational: agentic coding doesn’t work if every change has to sit in a slow pipeline.

Built in Ohio

All of this is happening from Columbus.

Before RWX, Manges helped build two high-profile companies from the inside as CTO: Braintree, acquired by PayPal for $800 million, and Root Insurance (where he was also co-founder), which went public in 2020. His next act isn’t a Bay Area startup but a Columbus-headquartered company hiring and building in Ohio.

That’s more than a biographical footnote. RWX is the kind of developer infrastructure that’s usually coming out of San Francisco or New York. Instead, this “biggest evolution in container technology since BuildKit” is being designed, funded and launched from a growing Midwest tech hub that’s increasingly home to both cloud-scale infrastructure and the software that runs on top of it.

If RWX’s container builder lives up to its billing — dramatically faster builds, simpler configuration and the same Docker images everyone already runs — its impact will be felt far beyond Ohio. Every time a developer pushes code anywhere in the world, a container has to be built.

RWX is making the case that a crucial piece of that workflow can come from Columbus.