HumanLayer
Getting AI Coding Agents to solve hard problems in complex codebases. HumanLayer lets software contact humans for feedback, input, and approvals, designed for implementing manual approval steps for software- and human-driven workflows, oversight of autonomous AI agents.
Founding Story
HumanLayer started when the founder was building AI agents for data teams. They wanted to automate tedious tasks like dropping unused tables, but customers were rightfully opposed to giving AI agents direct access to production systems. This led to the creation of HumanLayer as an API that enables safe deployment of autonomous AI systems in production by keeping humans in the loop for critical decisions.
Discussions
No discussions yet
Be the first to start a discussion about HumanLayer
Leadership
Founders
Dexter Horthy
Started coding at 17 at NASA JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory). Spent 7 years as an Engineer, SE, PM, and Exec at Replicated, a series C dev tools startup. Worked on container orchestrators and helped teams like Hashicorp, DataStax, and H2O.ai deliver and ship on-prem k8s products. Previous roles include: VP Solutions Engineering and Customer Success at Replicated (2020-2022), Senior Product Manager/Advisor to CEO at Replicated (2022-2023), CEO and Co-Founder at metalytics.dev (2023-2024), Platform Engineering Lead and Backend Engineer at Aspiration.com (2016-2017), Software Engineer at Sprout Social (2013-2016), Summer Intern at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2008), and Technical Office Assistant at University of Chicago (2012-2013). Currently Advisor at Prefect since 2021.
Executive Team
Dexter Horthy
Founder and CEO
Started coding at 17 at NASA JPL. Spent 7 years in various roles at Replicated (series C dev tools startup) including VP Solutions Engineering, Senior PM, and Advisor to CEO. Founded metalytics.dev (2023-2024). Experience at Aspiration.com and Sprout Social. Advisor at Prefect since 2021.
Business Model
Revenue Model
API usage-based pricing with credits system, subscription tiers, and enterprise plans. Free tier for development and small-scale projects, pay-as-you-go for production usage, and enterprise plans with whitelabeling, additional features, and priority support.
Pricing Tiers
Includes 1,000 operations per month. Great for development, testing, and small-scale projects.
Credits-based pricing for usage beyond the free tier. Flexible for production usage.
Higher usage caps, additional channels (Microsoft Teams, SMS), private VPC or on-prem deployment options, enterprise features like RBAC/SSO, whitelabeling, additional features, and priority support for teams building customer-facing agents.
Currently free to use during the private beta phase.
Target Markets
- Technology sector
- AI/ML companies building autonomous agents
- Developer tools companies
- Enterprise engineering organizations
- Data teams
- DevOps teams
- Internal automations requiring approval
- Dynamic data labeling
- Customer-facing control and visibility
- AI SDR that drafts personalized sales emails with human approval in Slack
- Ask in Slack before dropping database tables
- AI newsletter where subscribers have email conversations with content
- Boundary
- Syntax Cinema - Tom Granot
- Casco
- Two YC customers with 50-100 person engineering teams
History & Milestones
Deep dive on Ralph with Geoff Huntley discussing history, cursed lang, and comparing bash-loop Ralph implementation with Anthropic stop-hook implementation
Geoff Huntley presents the foundation of Ralph at a meetup, introducing the compiler stack written in Rust for autonomous coding
Geoff launches Ralph officially in a blog post with the basic bash loop structure
Ralph featured in 'Getting AI to work in complex codebases' on HackerNews and YouTube talk. HumanLayer used Ralph for frontend refactor, developing REACT_REFACTOR_PLAN.md over 6 hours
Geoff launches cursed lang officially, the programming language that Ralph built. HumanLayer hit $660K revenue with 6 person team
1 AI Tool by HumanLayer
HumanLayer
6moAPI + SDK for adding human-in-the-loop approvals, feedback, and outreach to AI agents across Slack, Email, and more.
