Runtime emerged from Y Combinator's P26 batch with infrastructure designed to democratize coding agents across entire organizations. Founders Gus and Carlos hit obstacles when scaling agent workflows beyond individual engineers, encountering unmergeable PRs, inconsistent setups, and security risks that prevented broader team adoption.

The platform captures complete development environments including Docker Compose stacks, databases, and services, spinning up fully configured sandboxes in milliseconds. Runtime supports multiple providers like E2B and EC2 while injecting secrets through managed proxies and enforcing command allowlists at the infrastructure layer. This approach enables PMs, finance teams, and support staff to safely interact with codebases without risking production systems.

Early adopters include a fintech unicorn and multiple YC portfolio companies, some of whom replaced internal tooling with Runtime's solution. The core platform is Apache 2.0 licensed on GitHub, with hosted pricing based on flat platform fees rather than token markups. Teams can deploy via CLI, Slack, or GitHub integrations while maintaining visibility into agent actions and costs.