PyCon: Welcoming 8 Companies to Startup Row at PyCon US 2025
Agentic coding went from a theoretical possibility to something seemingly overnight, andAll Hands AI’s open-source platformOpenHandsis one of the reasons why. Written in Python (with a JavaScript front-end), OpenHands lets an AI developer do everything a human can: edit repositories, run shell commands, browse the web, call APIs—even lift snippets straight from Stack Overflow—and then roll it all back into a commit you can review and merge.
Since its first README-only commit just 14 months ago, the project has snowballed into 54k-plusGitHubstars and 6k forks, backed by a community of roughly 310 contributors and counting. The momentum helped the team close a $5 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures last September, giving the ten-person startup runway to layer commercial tooling on top of its permissively-licensed core.
“About six months ago it finally clicked—I now write about 95% of my own code with agents,” says co-founder and chief scientistGraham Neubig, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon who shipped the project’s first lines beforeRobert Brennan—now CEO—joined the project and built a globally-distributed team to scale it up. Neubig credits the early decision to ship a “non-functional prototype” and build in public for catalyzing the contributor base; today, community members maintain everything from Windows support to protocol bridges while swapping LLM benchmarks daily in the project’s Slack.
OpenHands has evolved from a weekend proof-of-concept into a community-driven framework that now aims for production-grade reliability as an open alternative to proprietary code agents. Weekly releases focus on reproducible debugging, cost control, and enterprise safeguards, and contributors are already using the system to generate and review real pull requests across a growing set of Python projects.
PyCon US gives the community a chance to come together and learn about what’s new and interesting about the Python language and the seemingly infinite variety of problems that can be solved with a few (or a few thousand) lines of Python code. For entrepreneurial Pythonistas, Startup Row at PyCon US presents a unique opportunity for startup companies to connect directly with the developer community they’re building for.
Kicked off in 2011, Startup Row at PyCon US gives early-stage startups access to the best of what PyCon US has to offer, including conference passes and booth space, at no cost to their teams. Since its inception, including this year’s batch, well over 150 companies have been featured on Startup Row, and there’s a good chance you are familiar with some of their products and projects. Pandas, Modin, Codon, Ludwig, Horovod, SLSA, and dozens of other open-source tools were built or commercialized by companies featured on Startup Row at PyCon US.
Think of Startup Row at PyCon US as a peek into the future of the Python software ecosystem. And with that, we’re pleased to introduce the 2025 batch!
The Startup Row 2025 Lineup
AgentOps
Building an AI agent that works is only half the battle; seeing why it fails, how much it costs, and whether it’s about to go rogue is the other half.AgentOpsgives developers that missing x-ray vision. Drop a two-line SDK into your code and every run is captured as a “session” complete with step-by-step waterfalls, prompt/response pairs, cost and token metrics, and security flags—instantly viewable in a web dashboard.
The idea was born at a San Francisco hackathon, where co-foundersAlex ReibmanandAdam Silvermandiscovered that their agent-debugging tools were more popular than the agents themselves. They turned those internal tools into AgentOps, raised a $2.6 million pre-seed led by 645 Ventures and Afore Capital in August 2024, and now give thousands of AI engineers a live dashboard that replays every agent step, surfaces exact cost and latency metrics, and enforces benchmark-driven safety checks—all from a two-line SDK.
Open-sourced under an MIT license, the project has already racked up 4.4kGitHubstars and integrates out-of-the-box with OpenAI Agents SDK, CrewAI, LangChain, AutoGen and dozens of other frameworks. With observability handled, AgentOps wants to be to autonomous agents what Datadog is to micro-services: the layer that makes ambitious agent stacks safe enough for production—and cheap enough to keep running.
AllHands AI
https://pycon.blogspot.com/2025/05/startup-row-at-pycon-us-2025-lineup.html
