All Hands AI secures $5M in seed to boost its open-source AI software development agent

All Hands AI is the most recent startup to join the race to develop the ideal AI-powered software development assistant. The company recently shared it raised a $5 million seed funding round led by Menlo Ventures, and backed by Pillar VC, Betaworks, Rebellion, and several angel investors, including Hugging Face Co-Founder Thom Wolf; Cloudera Co-Founder Jeff Hammerbacher; and PyTorch creator and Meta VP Soumith Chintala.

Founded by Robert Brennan, Xingyao Wang, and Graham Neubig, who combine a great deal of research experience on AI agents for coding, All Hands is on a mission to accomplish two things: to go beyond the notion of a software development assistant as a 'smarter autocomplete', which means that All Hands aims to develop agents that are capable of performing tasks autonomously; and to do this without gating the process behind closed doors. These goals have culminated in All Hands' main offering, OpenHands (formerly OpenDevin): an open-source AI-powered "software development agent that can autonomously solve software development tasks end-to-end." Since its recent spring of 2024 launch, OpenHands has quickly gained traction, boasting over 30,000 stars and 180 unique contributors on GitHub.

Parker McKee, partner at Pillar VC, recognizes that All Hands' open-source community is the largest among developers working on coding agents. The startup will likely replicate the strategy of other open-source projects and leverage this sizeable community along with closed-source features geared towards the demands of enterprise settings to start earning some money.