herdr YC Application

Fall 2026Active

Ankara

herdr went through Y Combinator in the Fall 2026 batch as a B2B company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Fall 2026
Industry: B2BEngineering, Product and Design
Location: Ankara
Team size: 1
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Can CelikFounder/CEO

What herdr does

Developers don't run one coding agent anymore. They run fleets of them - for hours, sometimes days - across laptops, servers, and sandboxes. Keeping track of that work is the new bottleneck: which agent is blocked, which one finished, which terminal is it in, and why did everything die when the laptop closed. Herdr is the open-source home for that work. A background server owns the agents' terminal sessions on each machine, so the work survives disconnects, closed lids, and dropped SSH. Herdr detects each agent and turns the chaos into an attention queue - working, blocked, done, across every project - so you look only when an agent needs you. Every client is just a view: the bundled terminal UI, SSH from another machine, your phone. Close one, open another; the work never stops. Software can drive it too: a CLI, a socket API, and a plugin marketplace that passed 500 community plugins in its first month. The runtime is Apache-2.0 and stays open. Four months after launch: 25k GitHub stars, 340k downloads.

herdr's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

herdr, Fall 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

herdr

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Open-source agent runtime for developers

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We're building herdr, the open agent runtime for developers. Devs now run fleets of coding agents at once, across laptops, servers, and sandboxes, and keeping track of what each is doing is chaos. Herdr solves this by running a background server that owns every agent's terminal session on the machine, so work survives disconnects, closed lids, even dropped SSH. It queues agent status (working, blocked, done) across all projects, so you check only when needed. Clients are just views - web, terminal UI, SSH, phone. It has a CLI, socket API, and a plugin system that's already seen strong community traction.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

Ankara, Ankara, Turkey. The company would be based there after YC too.

Explain your decision regarding location.

I'm based in Ankara and have built everything here. Being open source and internet-native means location isn't a bottleneck right now.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real herdr YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from herdr's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like herdr would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.