At its core, programming represents a blend of creativity and technical skill. However, in today’s landscape of shifting processes to the left, software developers often find their days consumed by what Robert Brennan, CEO and co-founder of All Hands AI, describes as “toil-oriented tasks”—activities such as writing unit tests, managing dependencies, and updating documentation. While AI might lack the flair of creativity, it excels at these repetitive tasks.
All Hands AI recently announced a $5 million seed funding round led by Menlo Ventures, with the mission to create open-source, model-agnostic AI agents that tackle these mundane duties. This approach allows developers to concentrate more on their core competencies.
A few months back, Cognition AI unveiled Devin, an AI agent capable of planning and executing complex engineering tasks and potentially creating and deploying new applications from start to finish.
“I was truly amazed by the Cognition demo, and I believe many software engineers felt the same,” Brennan stated in an interview preceding the funding announcement. “It sparked our imagination about the future of development but also raised concerns since it was being developed as closed source in an environment we could neither see nor contribute to as a community.”
Originating as OpenDevin earlier this year, this open-source initiative has now rebranded to OpenHands, evolving from a simple text file on GitHub to an impressive repository with over 30,000 stars and more than 150 contributors.
The ambition behind the OpenHands AI agent is for it to serve as a proactive pair programmer that collaborates closely with developers. It aims to manage a variety of tasks—from writing tests to deploying applications—while intelligently recognizing how changes in one file, like renaming a function, may impact other parts of the system, prompting the developer for adjustments.
“AI is poised to transform the developer experience significantly, but developers will continue to favor open source, particularly for technology that influences their daily work,” said Joff Redfern, a partner at Menlo Ventures and former chief product officer at Atlassian. “By fostering an open development environment, All Hands AI is driving the software engineering community toward a more integrated AI-powered experience.”
Brennan, along with co-founders Xingyao Wang (Chief AI Officer) and Graham Neubig (Chief Scientist), brings a wealth of experience in natural language processing and agent development. Brennan has a background in document summarization at Google and has held various executive roles in startups focused on machine learning and infrastructure. Neubig is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon specializing in natural language processing, while Wang is currently interrupting his doctoral studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he conducted research on interactive language agents driven by foundational models.
“Technologically, we were not surprised to see the Cognition demo,” Brennan acknowledged. “We knew the potential existed, but witnessing it flourish in a coherent user experience inspired us to advocate for developing this technology openly.”
Brennan also pointed out that tools like GitHub Copilot are beneficial, though they don’t yet encompass the entire “agentic loop of writing code,” similar to a self-driving car. This is precisely what All Hands AI is targeting, even if it remains a work in progress. He also noted that handing an AI agent access to a team’s entire JIRA backlog to autonomously execute tasks is not currently feasible. Furthermore, like many experts in the industry, he believes that human developers will continue to be indispensable for quite some time.
There are ongoing discussions about the ideal user experience for such systems. Notably, All Hands AI has a designer on its team, emphasizing the importance of addressing these challenges at an early stage. Currently, the user experience is somewhat separate from the development environment, but the team plans to integrate with tools like VS Code and other editors soon.
Like many open-source startups, All Hands AI anticipates generating revenue by providing premium, closed-source features for enterprises. “We see an opportunity to develop software that complements our open-source offering, providing significant value to large organizations, which, in turn, supports the sustainability of our project through financial contributions,” Brennan explained.
With this initial funding, the team aims to bolster its technology stack before expanding into monetization. Alongside Menlo Ventures leading the round, other participants include Pillar VC, Betaworks, and Rebellion, complemented by contributions from angel investors such as Hugging Face co-founder Thom Wolf, Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher, and PyTorch creator Soumith Chintala.
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