Agno
The programming language for agentic software.
Agno (formerly Phidata) builds a high-performance open-source agent runtime — memory, knowledge, storage and monitoring built in — aiming to be the substrate beneath agentic applications rather than just a framework.
Open-source project
In the news
DeepSeek ships Harness Desktop; the 'everything is a plugin' harness passes 240k stars
DeepSeek releases a macOS and Windows Desktop app for DeepSeek Harness, its open-source agent harness where everything — tools, sub-agents, even the loop — is a plugin. The repo passed 240k stars within three months of its August launch, making it the fastest-growing harness in the field's history.
Runta raises $20M seed to 'parent' AI agents
a16z leads a $20M seed into Runta at a $100M+ valuation for its agent execution layer — sandboxes, spending caps and audit trails that treat agents like children who need supervision. Martin Casado called it 'core systems software rebuilt for agents'; the round came after prompt-injection containment failures made agent governance urgent.
xAI open-sources Grok Build, its coding agent harness
xAI open-sources Grok Build — a Rust coding agent harness and fullscreen TUI around Grok models — unusually early for a first-party tool. It joins Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI as the fourth major first-party harness, now with a fourth open one.
Microsoft Agent Framework unifies AutoGen and Semantic Kernel
Microsoft announces the public preview of its Agent Framework, converging AutoGen's multi-agent research lineage with Semantic Kernel's enterprise abstractions — a major consolidation in orchestration frameworks.
Related startups
LangChain
The de-facto standard toolkit for building LLM applications and agents.
LangChain makes the LangChain framework and LangGraph, the low-level orchestration standard for stateful, controllable agents, plus the LangSmith platform for tracing, evaluating and monitoring them in production.
Sierra
Conversational AI agents for customer experience.
Sierra, co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, builds production conversational agents that resolve real customer issues with guardrails, evaluation and human escalation — a template for deploying vertical agents at the enterprise edge.
CrewAI
Multi-agent orchestration, from open-source framework to enterprise platform.
CrewAI popularized role-based multi-agent teams ('crews') with a simple mental model and ships an enterprise control plane for deploying, monitoring and governing them.