Herdr Took YC Money and Relicensed Its 25K-Star Agent Runtime From AGPL to Apache-2.0 on the Way In
Herdr — a background server that owns coding agents' terminal sessions so work survives closed lids, dropped SSH, and disconnects, and turns agent state into a working/blocked/done attention queue — announced it is joining Y Combinator's F26 batch while moving from AGPL to Apache-2.0 with v0.8.0. The project reports roughly 25,000 GitHub stars, 349,668 installs, 510 community plugins, and native detection of 19 agent CLIs including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, opencode, and Grok; it wraps none of them, it just owns their terminals. The 224-point Hacker News thread was dominated not by the funding but by the license direction: relicensing to be *more* permissive on the way into VC funding is the opposite of the Warp/enshittification pattern commenters expected, and the founder disclosed no monetization plan at all.
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