# Omnara Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/omnara/ · added 2026-11-05 · updated 2026-11-06 **In short.** Omnara (Open-source control plane for AI agents; started as a web and mobile remote control for Claude Code, USA): More than 6000 users of its first product, January 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 2 co-founders, Ishaan Sehgal (CEO) and Kartik Sarangmath (CTO); team size 4 on the Y Combinator profile, November 2026. Launched August 2025; still running. Open-source control plane for AI agents; started as a web and mobile remote control for Claude Code · USA · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · still running · group: Developer tools and coding agents - Outcome: More than 6000 users of its first product, January 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure) - Launch: August 2025; months from launch to the outcome: 5 - Team: 2 co-founders, Ishaan Sehgal (CEO) and Kartik Sarangmath (CTO); team size 4 on the Y Combinator profile, November 2026 - Outside funding: Y Combinator, Summer 2025 batch; the size of any round is not published - Main factor: Builder's own itch - Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 2, capital needed 2 - Tags: AI-native, Small team, Funded, Running, B2B, Developer Tools Links: - Visit omnara.com: https://www.omnara.com/ **The product.** Omnara is now an API and dashboard to deploy and run AI agents on any model and any machine. The code is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, so a team can host it on its own servers; the company also runs a hosted cloud. The pricing page lists no platform fee: customers pay only for Omnara-managed models at the provider's token rates and for Omnara-managed machines by memory and time. The first product, launched in August 2025, let a developer start Claude Code on a laptop and continue the same session from a web page or an iPhone app; the launch posts listed its price as US$9 a month in August 2025 and US$20 a month in January 2026. **Why it worked.** The two founders, childhood friends who worked in AI infrastructure at Microsoft, ThirdAI and Meta AI, wrote that they built the first product because Claude Code kept them waiting at the desk for its questions. After two launches for coding-agent users, they changed the product in August 2026 to the infrastructure that companies build for their own agents, and positioned it against Anthropic's own hosted service, Claude Managed Agents. Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts. ## Summary Omnara started as a remote control for coding agents, programs such as Claude Code that read and change a code base on their own and stop to ask the developer questions. Its first version, launched by Ishaan Sehgal and Kartik Sarangmath in the Y Combinator Summer 2025 batch, mirrored a Claude Code session from the terminal to a web dashboard and an iPhone app, with push notifications when the agent needed an answer. In August 2026 the founders relaunched Omnara as an open-source control plane, the layer that starts, stops, stores and exposes agents through one API, so that a company does not build its own servers, sandboxes and logs for each agent. The company blog said in January 2026 that more than 6,000 people had sent more than two million messages through the first product. The GitHub repository showed 3.4k stars in November 2026. No revenue figure was found, so this page is grade E. The Y Combinator profile lists a team of 4. ## Pricing Omnara prices in November 2026, read on the company's pricing page (grade C) | Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit | |---|---|---|---| | Self-serve platform | 0 | 0 | full platform, no per-seat fees; own model keys and own machines free | | Omnara-managed models | provider token rates | provider token rates | pay for the tokens the agents use | | Omnara-managed machine runtime | 0.0414 per GiB-hour | 0.0414 per GiB-hour | billed while the machine is online; idle machines sleep | | Omnara-managed machine retention | 0.20016 per GiB per 30 days | 0.20016 per GiB per 30 days | in addition to runtime | | Self-hosted (Apache 2.0) | 0 | 0 | run the open-source code yourself | | Enterprise | contact sales | contact sales | own cloud or on-prem deployment, SSO, audit logs, custom SLAs | The platform itself has no fee and can be self-hosted for free. Charges apply only to Omnara-managed models and machines. The pricing page gives an example: a 4 GiB machine active one hour a day costs about US$5 a month in runtime plus US$0.80 in retention. Earlier prices of the first product, from the Y Combinator launch posts: free for up to 10 agent sessions a month, then US$9 a month for unlimited sessions (15 August 2025) and US$20 a month for unlimited sessions (23 January 2026). ## How much revenue does Omnara make? The numbers, graded A two-founder Y Combinator company that changed from a Claude Code remote control to an open-source agent platform, with no published revenue | Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources | |---|---|---|---|---| | Founded | 2025, San Francisco | C | Y Combinator company profile: 'year_founded' 2025, location San Francisco, batch Summer 2025. | [1] | | Founders | Ishaan Sehgal (Founder/CEO) and Kartik Sarangmath (Founder/CTO) | C | Y Combinator profile. Sehgal's bio says he was an AI infrastructure engineer at Microsoft; Sarangmath's says he worked at ThirdAI and trained multimodal models at Meta AI. | [1] | | Team size | 4 | C | Y Combinator profile, 'team_size' 4, read 5 November 2026. The January 2026 blog post is signed by the two founders and one more person. | [1, 7] | | First launch | 15 August 2025 | C | Y Combinator launch post 'The first command center for AI agents: terminal, web, and mobile'. | [2] | | First product price | US$9 a month (August 2025), US$20 a month (January 2026) | C | August 2025 launch: 'Free for up to 10 agent sessions/month. $9/month for unlimited.' January 2026 launch: '$20/month: unlimited sessions'. | [2, 3] | | Users of the first product | more than 6,000 people, more than 2 million messages | C | Company blog, 28 January 2026: 'Over six thousand people have sent more than two million messages through Omnara'. The post is now marked as covering the previous product. | [7] | | Product change | 24 August 2026 | C | Third Y Combinator launch post 'The API for Production-Ready agents': 'an open-source alternative to Claude Managed Agents, Langchain Managed Agents, Vercel Eve, etc.' | [4] | | Current price | US$0 platform fee; pay as you go for managed models and machines | C | Pricing page, 5 November 2026. | [6] | | GitHub repository | 3.4k stars, 261 forks, Apache 2.0 license | B | GitHub's own counters on github.com/omnara-ai/omnara, read 5 November 2026. | [9] | | Outside funding | Y Combinator (Summer 2025); amount not published | C | The home page says 'Backed by Y Combinator'. No source gives a round size. | [1, 5] | | Time from launch to the user figure | 5 months | calc | Calculated: August 2025 to January 2026. | [2, 7] | How to read this table: a grade C value is the company's own statement on its site, its blog or its Y Combinator pages. A grade B value is a counter that GitHub itself shows. A "calc" value was computed on this page. No revenue figure exists in any source. ## When did Omnara launch, and how did it grow? Timeline From a phone app for Claude Code to an agent platform in about fifteen months. Each entry carries its grade. - **2025** (grade C [1]): Omnara is founded in San Francisco by Ishaan Sehgal and Kartik Sarangmath and joins Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch. - **15 August 2025** (grade C [2]): First launch: a wrapper around Claude Code that streams the session to a web dashboard and an iPhone app; free for 10 sessions a month, US$9 a month for unlimited. - **23 January 2026** (grade C [3]): Second launch, 'Run Claude Code from Anywhere': the agent can continue in the cloud when the laptop goes offline, plus voice input; US$20 a month for unlimited sessions. - **28 January 2026** (grade C [7]): The company blog states more than 6,000 users and more than two million messages. - **24 August 2026** (grade C [4]): Relaunch as an open-source, model-agnostic API for managed agents, positioned against Claude Managed Agents. - **November 2026** (grade B [6, 9]): The pricing page lists a free platform with pay-as-you-go machines and models; the GitHub repository shows 3.4k stars. ## Why did Omnara work? ### Built for the founders' own work The August 2025 launch post says the founders used Claude Code every day and built Omnara so they could answer it away from the desk. Claude Code users were the first market because, in the post's words, they 'immediately get the value'. ### Open source as the funnel The code has been public on GitHub since the first launch. A developer can self-host it for free, and the hosted cloud sells only the models and machines. The repository had 3.4k stars in November 2026. ### Follow the bigger buyer The third launch moved from single developers on a monthly plan to companies that run agents for their users and staff. The home page compares Omnara with building in-house and with one-vendor managed platforms, and quotes engineering posts from companies that built such platforms themselves. ### Bring your own model and machine Customers can connect their own model API keys (OpenAI and Anthropic formats) and their own Linux or macOS machines for free. The company earns only when the customer uses its hosted models or machines. ## How it was built These details come from the company's launch posts, pricing page and GitHub repository. They are grade C unless marked. - The first product was a command-line wrapper that parsed Claude Code's session file and terminal output and streamed every message to the Omnara servers with server-sent events (SSE), according to the August 2025 launch post. - The current platform installs a small program, omnarad, on any Linux or macOS machine to connect it to the control plane; sandboxes can come from Blaxel, Daytona or Unikraft with the customer's own keys. - Hosted models are served through OpenRouter and hosted sandboxes through Blaxel, as the August 2026 launch post says. - Agents are set up by pasting a SKILL.md link into a coding agent, or with a CLI, a TypeScript SDK or plain HTTP calls, as the home page shows. - The repository on GitHub had 678 commits and an Apache 2.0 license when read on 5 November 2026 (GitHub counter, grade B). Sources: [2, 4, 5, 9] ## Who tried this before Omnara, and why did they fail? Three companies in our database of failed startups tried to sell developer infrastructure or developer AI before Omnara. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified. The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade. ### Nitrous.io (2012 to 2016; funding US$8M; cause: Competition) - Promise: Cloud development environments so a developer could code from anywhere without local setup. - Why it died: Amazon bought the rival Cloud9 and gave it away as part of AWS, and the cloud providers offered free shells. - Record: ### Parse.com (2011 to 2017; funding US$85M; cause: Unit Economics) - Promise: A hosted backend so app developers did not need to run databases and servers. - Why it died: Its free tier cost real infrastructure, and Facebook, which bought it, closed it; developers learned the risk of a closed hosted backend. - Record: ### Kite DevTool (2014 to 2024; funding US$21M; cause: Competition) - Promise: AI code completion inside the developer's editor. - Why it died: GitHub Copilot, built on a large language model and bundled with GitHub, took the market, and the paid tier never sold well enough. - Record: ## What changed Nitrous.io and Parse.com sold closed hosted platforms and lost when a bigger platform gave the same thing away or closed it. Omnara publishes its whole platform under Apache 2.0 and lets customers run it on their own machines, so a customer keeps the code even if the company stops. Its competitor is again a platform owner: Anthropic sells Claude Managed Agents. Kite lost when a better model arrived inside a bigger product. Omnara does not build a model; it lets customers bring any model, so a better model from any provider can run on it. The company's own risk is the opposite one: the first product depended on one tool, Claude Code, which is why it changed in August 2026. ## Can one person copy Omnara now? **Verdict: Hard for one person; the platform needs infrastructure skill and time.** A solo developer could copy the first product, a remote control for one coding agent, because it is a wrapper that streams a session to a phone. The current product, a durable control plane with machines, sandboxes and audit logs, needs infrastructure engineers and money to run before revenue. 1. Build the tool you need every day for a new kind of AI program, and launch it where its users already gather. 2. Publish the code so developers can try it without a sales call. 3. Charge for the parts that cost you money (hosted models and machines) and keep the self-hosted version free. 4. Watch which feature the model vendor ships next, and move before it covers your product. **What is still open.** Small control planes for one kind of agent: browser agents for back-office work, or review agents for one programming language. ## What could go wrong for Omnara? - **What is not verified.** No revenue figure was found. We looked for a payment-processor profile, a founder interview with numbers, and a filing; none exists in the sources. The only traction figure is the company's own blog post of 28 January 2026 (more than 6,000 users and two million messages of the first product), which nobody else has checked. A reader could look for a funding announcement or a founder interview that gives paying customers or revenue. - **The product changed twice.** The three Y Combinator launch posts describe a Claude Code remote control (August 2025), a remote and cloud runner for Claude Code (January 2026) and an open-source managed-agent API (August 2026). The blog marks its posts before June 2026 as 'Posts from an earlier chapter of Omnara'. The user figure on this page belongs to the earlier product. - **Trust signals on the home page.** The home page shows a 'Trusted by' list of six names with no linked case studies, and one named customer quote from an agency founder. It also quotes engineering posts by Stripe, Shopify, Sentry, Harvey, WorkOS and Sierra about platforms they built for themselves; these companies are not presented as Omnara customers. One example agent on the home page, a 'Signal digest', reads public posts on X, Reddit and LinkedIn; how it reads them is not described. - **Competition and dependence.** Omnara names Claude Managed Agents, LangChain Managed Agents and Vercel Eve as the products it replaces. On this site, Remodex and Pushary sell phone control of coding agents like Omnara's first product, and CRHQ sells a hosted agent harness. The first product depended on Claude Code and let users run it with their own Claude Pro or Max subscription; the current one sells hosted models through OpenRouter and hosted sandboxes through Blaxel, and supports OpenAI and Anthropic API formats. ## Sources 1. Y Combinator: Omnara company profile — https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omnara (grade C). Read the profile data in full (downloaded 5 November 2026). Source for the founders, founding year, batch, team size and the three launch posts embedded in the page. 2. Y Combinator Launch, 15 August 2025: Omnara - The first command center for AI agents: terminal, web, and mobile — https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/OCT-omnara-the-first-command-center-for-ai-agents-terminal-web-and-mobile (grade C). Read in full as the launch text embedded in the Y Combinator company profile. Source for the first product, how it was built and the US$9 price. 3. Y Combinator Launch, 23 January 2026: Omnara: Run Claude Code from Anywhere — https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/PFp-omnara-run-claude-code-from-anywhere (grade C). Read in full as the launch text embedded in the Y Combinator company profile. Source for the cloud handoff, voice and the US$20 price. 4. Y Combinator Launch, 24 August 2026: Omnara: The API for Production-Ready agents — https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/T9k-omnara-the-api-for-production-ready-agents (grade C). Read in full as the launch text embedded in the Y Combinator company profile. Source for the product change, own machines and models, OpenRouter and Blaxel. 5. Omnara home page, read 5 November 2026 — https://www.omnara.com/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the current product, the logo list, the customer quote and the quoted engineering posts. 6. Omnara pricing page, read 5 November 2026 — https://www.omnara.com/pricing (grade C). Read in full. Source for the pricing table. 7. Omnara blog, 28 January 2026: Beyond the Desk — https://www.omnara.com/blog/welcome-to-omnara (grade C). Read in full. Source for the 6,000 users and two million messages. 8. Omnara blog index, read 5 November 2026 — https://www.omnara.com/blog (grade C). Read in full. Source for the post dates and the 'earlier chapter' archive. 9. GitHub: omnara-ai/omnara — https://github.com/omnara-ai/omnara (grade B). Read the repository page (5 November 2026). Source for stars, forks, commits and the license. 10. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors. Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Omnara? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Omnara).