Enterprise software development is poised for transformation after OpenHands announced that it has secured $18.8 million in a Series A funding round. Madrona Venture Group led the investment with participation from Menlo Ventures, Obvious Ventures, Fujitsu Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.
Unlike many developer tools that lock companies into a single IDE or a specific large-language model (LLM) infrastructure, OpenHands offers an open, enterprise-grade platform that enables software teams to deploy and scale autonomous coding agents in their own cloud environment. According to the company, this avoids vendor lock-in while enabling governance, visibility, and integration with enterprise workflows.
The company also announced a strategic collaboration with AMD to co-develop and optimize its agent platform for AMD hardware, leveraging the open-source Lemonade Server project to accelerate agent performance and enhance enterprise readiness.
OpenHands’ value proposition is built on four main pillars:
- The ability for organizations to run hundreds to thousands of autonomous coding agents simultaneously in a sandboxed, secure runtime, using any LLM of their choice.
- Integration with common developer tools and workflows (such as GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket, Slack, and Jira), enabling teams to offload tasks like dependency upgrades, unit-test generation, merge-conflict resolution, vulnerability sweeps, and code refactors.
- Enterprise governance features including role-based access control, audit trails, quota,s and admin dashboards to monitor “who ran what, when, with what result.”
- Deployment flexibility — enterprises can choose SaaS or self-hosted/VPC environments while remaining model-agnostic and avoiding being locked into a single proprietary stack.
On the traction front, OpenHands reports more than 60,000 stars on GitHub, approximately 7,000 forks, over four million downloads and contributions from hundreds of developers globally. Engineers at organizations including AMD, Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, TikTok, NVIDIA, Mastercard and VMware have cloned or extended the platform. Early enterprise adopters say they have reduced code-maintenance backlogs by up to 50 % and cut vulnerability resolution times from days to minutes.
Madrona’s Managing Director, Soma Somasegar, said the firm sees the shift toward autonomous agents as moving from side-projects to core engineering team members and that OpenHands’ open, model-agnostic approach ensures this happens safely, transparently, and at scale. Fujitsu Ventures’ President & CEO, Hideaki Yajima, added that OpenHands stands out for enterprise-grade usability, security and reliability. From AMD’s side, the collaboration underscores the company’s commitment to open-source innovation, developer choice, and local performance optimization.
With this funding and partnership boost, OpenHands plans to accelerate its mission of making software development more open, human-centered, and safe, while enabling engineering teams to delegate real work to autonomous agents under full control.
KEY QUOTES:
“Software development is changing. 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.”
Robert Brennan, Co-Founder & CEO at OpenHands
“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.”
Adrian Macias, Sr. Director, Developer Acceleration at AMD
“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.”
Soma Somasegar, Managing Director at Madrona
“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.”
Hideaki Yajima, President & CEO of Fujitsu Ventures
