Factory acquires HumanLayer and will open-source it

Factory, the company behind the “Droids” coding agents, is acquiring HumanLayer, a start-up that builds tools for teams working with coding agents. HumanLayer’s co-founders, Dex Horthy and Kyle Mistele, are joining Factory, and HumanLayer itself will be open-sourced.

Horthy announced the deal on X on 4 November:

“super stoked to announce that HumanLayer is joining forces with factory incredibly grateful to all our customers, investors, friends and family who cheered us on this crazy journey in the past 3 years read our in-depth take, why we’re so excited, what happens to customers”

Both companies published posts on the deal. Neither disclosed the price.

What happens to HumanLayer customers

According to the HumanLayer blog, the current HumanLayer platform will stay up for a transition period of at least 30 days. During that time the team will help users export their data, move to Factory, or self-host the open-source version of HumanLayer. HumanLayer also says it will refund paying customers “for the last several months.”

HumanLayer had already open-sourced its core on 23 October, while keeping its hosted product running. Factory describes HumanLayer as having “a devoted developer community with hundreds of daily active users.”

What Factory gets

Horthy and Mistele are known for early work on coding-agent practice, including the Research/Plan/Implement framework they published in August 2025, Factory said. Factory said HumanLayer has been “regularly 6-9 months ahead of the zeitgeist” on how larger engineering teams work with coding agents.

Over the next few weeks the HumanLayer team plans to bring its most-used features to Factory. These include multiplayer tasks and workstreams, in-app collaboration on agent-written plans, product specs and design docs, and live session diff streaming.

Factory was founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes and is based in San Francisco. Its Droids plan, build and test software inside a company’s own infrastructure and approved models.

The deal is another sign that coding-agent companies are competing on team features, not just on writing code. The next thing to watch is how quickly HumanLayer’s collaboration tools appear in Factory, and how many HumanLayer users move over rather than self-host.

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