Coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor agents, and Codex work great for individual engineers, but engineering leaders are terrified to let PMs, designers, ops, or marketers actually use them against the real codebase — there is no easy way to enforce guardrails, give safe sandboxed access, or audit what each agent and human did. Runtime fixes that gap by giving teams a managed control plane on top of any coding agent: sandboxed environments, role-based access for humans and agents, allowlists, encrypted secrets, system instructions, and session-level observability that shows exactly what every human and agent did across every interaction.
In practice, non-engineers connect Runtime to the company repo and a coding agent of choice, work inside a per-task sandbox with curated context and skills, and ship via PR or deployment without ever touching prod directly. Engineering leads get a dashboard of who ran what, which tools were called, which files changed, and what was deployed — the same kind of visibility security teams already expect from CI/CD. Runtime is model-agnostic and infra-agnostic, so it sits in front of whichever agent or stack the team standardizes on rather than locking them in.
Founded in 2026 by Gus Trigos (CEO) and Carlos Volante (CTO) as part of YC's Spring 2026 (P26) batch, Runtime is based in San Francisco with a team of three. Per their Launch HN and YC launch posts, Runtime is already live with fast-growing YC scaleups whose engineers, PMs, designers, marketers, and ops people contribute to the codebase or build production-grade zero-to-one apps — reportedly used in 40+ countries with zero ad spend.