A hive mind that runs your company. Headcount: one.
OpenCompany is the operating layer for one-person businesses powered by agents. Not a team of agents taking turns, but a hive mind: a roster that deliberates like a colony, converges on decisions it can explain, and does the work of every function around the clock. You bring the vision and the judgment calls. The hive does the rest.
Warning
🚧 Work in progress. OpenCompany is under active development and moving fast. APIs, the CLI, the example harnesses, and the docs will change without notice. Explore it, fork it, build on it, but don't depend on anything staying put yet. Not production-ready.
The quickest way in is the desktop app. Get it from the website or straight from the GitHub release:
- Website: tinyhumans.ai/opencompany — the download button picks the right build for your machine.
- GitHub Releases:
github.com/tinyhumansai/opencompany/releases/latest
— the
.dmgfor Apple Silicon (aarch64) or Intel (x64) Macs, plus the release notes.
Open the .dmg, drag OpenCompany into Applications, launch it, and pick a
company. The app updates itself from the same releases page. Prefer to run the
host yourself, in Docker or from source? Jump to the Quickstart.
For a century, ambition meant headcount. Want to ship a product? Hire engineers. Want customers? Hire marketers, then sales, then support. Every new capability was a new payroll line, a new manager, a new quarter of ramp-up.
That tax is gone. OpenCompany turns a single operator into a full org chart. Scouts, founders, engineers, designers, marketers, lawyers, finance, support and recruiters, all instantiated as agents, coordinated by one host, working while you sleep. You stay where humans are irreplaceable: capital, taste, and the decisions that actually matter. Everything else is delegated.
This isn't a chatbot with a to-do list, and it isn't a pipeline of agents handing a ticket down the line. It's a company runtime: a durable host that stands up a roster of specialized agents, gives each one a clear mandate, seats them at desks, and lets each desk think as a hive on top of the OpenHuman and TinyHumans runtimes.
Most "multi-agent" systems are fan-out: publish a task, wake N agents, collect the replies, average them somehow. That's a thread pool with a prompt attached. It has no notion of who is talking to whom, no way for one specialist to hand a finding to the one colleague who needs it, and no reason to stop other than running out of members.
OpenCompany runs its desks as rooms, via tinyhivemind, the hive-mind library that grew out of this repo, hosted over the OpenHuman agent runtime.
Every conversation in a company runs through one company hive — a TinyHiveMind Coordinator that owns who runs and when. A message to a desk opens an episode on that desk's hive: the members it needs start at once, each turn can talk to the room or to one colleague, and the episode settles when the members it assigned say their part is done.
engineer hivemind_send_agent → writer Keep the copy short; the page ships Friday.
writer (reply) Draft is up — numbers in the second para.
engineer hivemind_complete Numbers checked against the ledger. Done.
- Talking is a tool call. An agent posts to a hive it sits on, messages a
colleague directly, or completes its part of an episode with the
hivemind_*tools. A message is delivered, not awaited: the answer arrives on the sender's next turn, so nothing blocks on anybody. - Concurrent, never twice. Different agents run at once, within a desk and across desks. One agent runs one turn at a time across every hive it sits in — the CEO on two desks is the same agent with the same memory.
- Routing by a model built for it. Who an unaddressed message needs is asked of Jev — TypeSafe's System One routing model — through the TinyHumans proxy on the key you already have. Name someone and they start; no key, and the desk lead starts.
- A reason to stop. An episode settles when its assigned members say it is done, or fails at the desk's round cap. One operator message is one bounded number of turns.
- Reach you can state. Who may message whom is the manifest's
delegates_to: desk peers plus the desks it names, or anybody when empty. - One continuous agent. Each teammate is one agent with one session that spans every desk it sits on, its DMs and the general line, so the question it answered on a desk an hour ago is one it remembers in a DM now.
Every turn is on the record: who started, who spoke, who messaged whom, and when the episode settled — live in the room as it happens, and rebuilt from the journal after a reload. A desk of one behaves like a single agent, so nothing here costs you anything until a desk has somebody to work with.
docs/spec/runtime/hive.md has the whole
mechanism, and scripts/measure-coordination.sh has the numbers on a
two-desk company.
Every folder under companies/ is a complete company you can
launch today, with a roster of agents, their responsibilities, and the handful
of moments where a human signs off:
| You want to run a… | The hive handles | You keep |
|---|---|---|
| Venture Studio | Scouting, founding, building, launching, operating a portfolio | Capital allocation & strategy |
| Startup Accelerator | Sourcing, screening, mentoring, demo day, investor intros | Investment decisions |
| VC Firm | Deal flow, diligence, memos, portfolio support | The final "yes" |
| Consulting Firm | Research, analysis, modeling, decks, implementation plans | Executive workshops |
| Software Company | PM, design, frontend, backend, QA, security, docs, support, DevRel | Product direction |
| Product Team | A triaged queue, a groomed backlog, a defended roadmap | Prioritization calls & roadmap sign-off |
| Marketing Agency | Creative, copy, SEO, paid, email, landing pages, analytics | Campaign sign-off |
| Design Studio | Branding, UI, motion, illustration, user testing | Creative direction |
| Media Company | Finding, verifying, writing, illustrating, distributing stories | Editorial standards |
| Influencer Brand | Scripting, editing, thumbnails, posting, community, sponsorships | Your face (or an avatar) |
| Game Studio | Worlds, story, code, art, QA, balance, launch | Creative direction |
| Game Business | UA, monetization, LiveOps, community, store optimization | Growth strategy |
| Recruiting Firm | Sourcing, outreach, screening, interviews, offers | Final hiring calls |
| Enterprise Sales | Lead gen, outreach, CRM, proposals, contracts, follow-up | Closing strategic accounts |
| Support Org | Tickets, docs, bug reports, escalations, refunds | Policy & escalation |
| Real Estate Co | Sourcing, analysis, underwriting, contractors, tenants | Purchase approvals |
| Accounting Firm | Bookkeeping, tax, payroll, forecasting, audit prep | Signing the filings |
| Law Firm | Research, drafting, litigation support, discovery, compliance | Approving filings |
| Pharma Startup | Literature, molecule discovery, simulation, trial planning | The lab work |
| Research Lab | Source-backed research reports with the evidence attached | Setting the question & accepting findings |
| Math Lab | Verified answers to computational problems, with the programs that produced them | Stating the problem & accepting the answer |
| Signals + Opportunity Studio | Scouting signals, clustering pains, ranking opportunities into a weekly brief | Which opportunities to fund |
Twenty-two companies. One operator. Pick one and run it, or run several at once.
companies/README.md has the full catalog.
You do not need a software background to run a company. You need either
Docker Desktop or Podman
with its Docker-compatible CLI and Compose provider, a terminal, and about
fifteen minutes. On Windows the terminal must be POSIX —
WSL or Git Bash — because the
quickstart below uses export and ./scripts/launch-demo.sh.
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/tinyhumansai/opencompany.git
cd opencompany
export TINYHUMANS_API_KEY="th-..." # grab yours at tinyhumans.ai
./scripts/launch-demo.sh marketing upThere is no bundled username or password. The first run takes a few minutes while it downloads and builds. When it settles, open http://localhost:5173: the sign-in screen of a company nobody has joined yet asks you to choose the admin login and a password (it suggests one — keep a copy), and signs you straight in. That's the console, where you watch your agents work and answer anything waiting on you. Whoever reaches a fresh host first becomes its admin, so do this before you expose the port to anyone else; the offer disappears the moment the first account exists.
Prefer to set the admin up from the shell — for a scripted deploy, or a host
you will not be first to open? ./scripts/init-demo-admin.sh marketing you@example.com prompts for a password and creates the account before the
first launch. Removing the data volume with
./scripts/launch-demo.sh marketing down -v removes the account too.
./scripts/list-demos.sh lists the other businesses you can launch in place of
marketing, and ./scripts/launch-demo.sh marketing down shuts it all down.
Prefer to build the host from source, deploy it somewhere, or change the runtime itself? That path lives in docs/running-locally.md: Cargo builds, Compose, feature flags, the Tauri desktop preview, and DigitalOcean / AWS deploys.
You'll want a TinyHumans API key. It's what lets the agents think and act. Without one you can still launch a company and look around; the agents just won't do real work. Grab a key at tinyhumans.ai and
export TINYHUMANS_API_KEY="th-...".
- A real org chart, not a prompt. Each company is declared as a roster of
agents with distinct mandates in a simple
company.toml. The host instantiates them, coordinates them, and keeps them running. - Desks that think as a hive. Any desk with two or more members answers as a room: rounds of concurrent turns in which seats post, DM and broadcast to each other until one reports the work complete, every utterance on the record. A desk of one behaves exactly like a single agent. No fan-out, no vote-averaging.
- Humans in the loop where it counts. Every harness names the exact decisions reserved for you. Delegate the work; keep the judgment.
- Built on proven runtimes. OpenCompany is a light host over OpenHuman, the TinyHumans agent modules and tinyhivemind, so it reuses their runtime and their mechanics instead of reinventing them.
- Rust-fast and inspectable. An Axum HTTP surface, a small default build, and deeper capabilities behind feature flags. Simple to start, honest to operate, easy to test.
- Yours to own. GPL-3.0, self-hostable, no lock-in.
Each company folder holds a company.toml, a plain text file naming the roles,
what each one owns, which desks they sit at, and where you want to be asked
before anything happens. It's written to be read by people; changing a role, or
tuning how a desk works (how many seats run at once, its round cap, whether it
can refer a question to another desk), is editing a few lines rather than programming. opencompany check reports any problems in plain language, and
adding a new business is a new folder, not a new program.
Your first company walks through it.
Nothing, unless it is a tenant on the TinyHumans hosted platform.
- A self-hosted install sends nothing — and not "nothing by default" in the sense of a switch someone could flip. The network client is behind a cargo feature the shipped default build does not compile in, so there is no code in that binary that could make the request. Getting one out of that state takes a recompile, not a config change.
- The desktop app reports by default, and you can turn it off in
Settings → Privacy (or
OPENCOMPANY_ANALYTICS=off). It sends the same shape-and-outcome events as a hosted tenant, from the app's Rust host, under a random per-install id that names no person (docs/spec/runtime/analytics-desktop.md). - Hosted tenants report product usage, because the platform builds their image with that feature on and injects a project token. What it reports is shape and outcome under an opaque id: how many companies are configured, which storage backend is in use, whether a turn finished or failed, and token and cost counts.
- No company content ever leaves, on any install. Not message text,
prompts, agent output, file paths, ledger values, tool names or arguments,
email addresses, company or agent names, task titles, error messages, or
credentials of any kind. That is enforced by construction rather than by
review: a reported property is a word compiled into the binary, a count, a
number or a boolean, and the type has no
Stringvariant for runtime text to arrive in. - To turn it off, set
OPENCOMPANY_ANALYTICS=off(on the desktop, also the Privacy setting). It outranks everything else, and boot prints one line saying which way it resolved.
docs/spec/runtime/analytics.md has every
event and property, the conditions that must all hold before anything is sent,
and how the opaque id is derived. Crash reporting is separate: a self-hosted
host is off until you configure your own Sentry DSN, while the official desktop
app, hosted tenants and a console bundle built without VITE_SENTRY_DSN report
to TinyHumans' projects unless you set your own DSN or OPENCOMPANY_SENTRY=off
/ VITE_SENTRY_DSN=off —
docs/spec/runtime/crash-reporting.md.
| Where | What's there |
|---|---|
docs/gitbooks/ |
The full docs: what OpenCompany is, what one person can run, and how it holds together |
docs/running-locally.md |
Docker, Compose, from-source builds, feature flags, desktop preview, deploy targets |
docs/repository-layout.md |
Where everything lives in the tree and what each package owns |
docs/spec/README.md |
Architecture reference |
docs/spec/runtime/hive.md |
How a desk works: episodes, concurrent rounds, speaking as a tool call, Jev routing and cross-desk referral |
docs/gitbooks/developers/ |
Build, CLI, authoring companies, deployment, configuration |
scripts/qa/ |
Checking a release against a deployed tenant |
New here? Start with the good first issues, which are scoped to be finishable in a sitting. CONTRIBUTING.md has the local checks to run before opening a pull request, and anything big enough to break an existing company starts as an RFC rather than a PR.
Discussions is where questions get answered and large changes get argued out before they're built. docs/SUPPORT.md says which channel takes what.
- Discord: https://discord.tinyhumans.ai
- X: @tinyhumansai
- Reddit: r/tinyhumansai
- Website: tinyhumans.ai/opencompany
Running a company with a headcount of one? Star the repo and help others find the path.
Show some love and end up in the hall of fame. Contributors get free merch and special access to our Discord.
OpenCompany is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3. See LICENSE.