Herdr Raises $6 Million In Funding; Solo Developer Builds 36,000 Stars In 4 Months

Beating AI Express: Coding Agent runtime Herdr has secured a $6 million seed round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and e2vc. Individual investors including Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht, and fal co-founder Görkem Yurtseven also joined the round. Herdr remains a 1-person team developed by Can Celik. It is essentially a tmux built specifically for Coding Agents, hosting tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor Agent CLI to enable unified background running, switching, and status monitoring. The Agents continue operating even when the terminal is closed or SSH disconnects. Launched roughly four months ago, Herdr already boasts over 36,000 GitHub stars and 780,000 downloads, with the community having built more than 1,000 plugins and related projects. The funding will primarily be used for hiring; Celik plans to form a small team to focus on operational stability, performance, and scalability. Herdr’s core runtime will remain open-source under the Apache 2.0 license, with no plans to switch to a closed-source model post-funding. Notably, Herdr launched multi-machine management just the day before, allowing users to simultaneously manage Agents on local machines, servers, and Mac minis from a single terminal.