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OpenHands Raises $18.8M Series A to Bring Open-Source Cloud Coding Agents to Enterprises

via Business Wire

With new funding led by Madrona, OpenHands introduces a secure, scalable cloud agent platform for modern software teams and announces a strategic collaboration with AMD

OpenHands, the open platform for cloud coding agents, today announced a $18.8M Series A led by Madrona, with participation from Menlo Ventures, Obvious Ventures, Fujitsu Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. Unlike most agentic tools locked to a single IDE or LLM, OpenHands offers an open, enterprise-secure platform that lets companies run and scale autonomous coding agents inside their own cloud. The funding will accelerate OpenHands’ mission to make software development more open, human-centered, and safe, enabling engineering teams to delegate real work to autonomous agents with full visibility and control. The company also announced a strategic collaboration with AMD to advance agent performance and enterprise readiness utilizing Lemonade Server, an open-source project with optimization for AMD hardware.

Most tools either lock customers into closed SaaS and a small set of LLMs while other open source agents are IDE-bound assistants that can’t scale beyond a single laptop. OpenHands bridges that gap with an open, model-agnostic, enterprise-secure agent platform that runs wherever customers need it, pairing developer friendliness with the governance, access control, and flexible deployment options enterprises require.

OpenHands lets organizations scale from one to thousands of agents in a secure, sandboxed runtime, and can work with any large language model. Teams use OpenHands to offload the repetitive parts of software development (dependency upgrades, adding unit tests, merge conflict resolution, vulnerability sweeps, code refactors) and to run asynchronous, parallel campaigns across large codebases. It integrates with GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket, Slack, and Jira, and includes organization-level security and governance capabilities.

Early traction & community

OpenHands has quickly become one of the most adopted open-source projects in the developer-AI ecosystem, earning more than 60,000 GitHub stars, 7,000 forks, 4 million downloads, and contributions from hundreds of developers worldwide. Engineers at organizations such as AMD, Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, TikTok, NVIDIA, Mastercard, and VMWare have cloned or forked the repository to use and extend the platform. OpenHands is already powering large-scale code-automation projects that accelerate reviews, expand test coverage, and refactor codebases in parallel. Early enterprise adopters report tangible results, reducing code-maintenance backlogs by up to 50 percent and cutting vulnerability resolution times from days to minutes.

“Software development is changing,” said Robert Brennan, Co-Founder & CEO at OpenHands. “But a lot of that change is happening behind closed doors. The software engineering community is increasingly aligning behind OpenHands as the open source standard for doing agentic software development at scale.”

“The integration of Lemonade Server with OpenHands reflects AMD’s commitment to open-source innovation and developer choice,” said Adrian Macias, Sr. Director, Developer Acceleration at AMD. “This collaboration enables local coding agents that prioritize privacy, cost efficiency, and flexible model selection – while taking advantage of acceleration on Ryzen AI PCs. Together, we’re supporting a range of workflows and staying true to open-source values.”

How customers accelerate trustworthy agentic development with OpenHands

  • Offload developer toil - create repeatable agents for upgrades, dependency bumps, lint/test fixes, vulnerability remediation, and refactors asynchronously across hundreds of repos.
  • Adopt safely - every agent executes in an isolated Docker sandbox for added security and safety; enterprises can deploy via SaaS or self-hosted/VPC.
  • Stay flexible - model-agnostic by design; bring your own LLM support, avoid vendor lock-in, and routes tasks to the best LLM for the job.
  • Maintain control - Role-based access control, audit trails, quotas, and admin dashboards deliver org-level visibility (who ran what, when, with what result).
  • Fit existing workflows - GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket, Slack, and Jira integrations; GUI for scoping, run management, and PR reviews without forcing developers out of their flow.

“We believe OpenHands represents a major shift in how software is built,” said Soma Somasegar, Managing Director at Madrona. “Autonomous agents are transforming from side-projects into core members of the engineering team and OpenHands’ open, model-agnostic approach ensures this transformation happens safely, transparently, and at enterprise scale. The team’s deep roots in both open source and developer experience make them uniquely positioned to define the category of cloud coding agents.”

"What stands out about OpenHands is how usable it is. Powerful, open source, and enterprise ready, it lets engineering teams iterate quickly while meeting high standards for security and reliability," said Hideaki Yajima, President & CEO of Fujitsu Ventures.

About OpenHands

OpenHands is the open, secure, and model-agnostic platform for cloud-based software agents. OpenHands automates real engineering work asynchronously so teams ship faster, safer, and with complete control. Built on an open-source foundation with an enterprise-grade, containerized runtime, OpenHands scales from a single agent to thousands, integrates with your existing toolchain, and gives organizations full visibility and governance across every run. Learn more at OpenHands.dev.

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