The biology of software development
Inspired by nature's most efficient distributed system
Why Colony?
Mycelium networks — the underground fungal systems connecting forests — are nature's original distributed computing platform. They've been solving problems of parallel processing, resource allocation, and resilient communication for hundreds of millions of years.
When we set out to build a multi-agent development environment, we realized the same principles apply: autonomous nodes (agents) communicating through a shared substrate (the mycelium layer), coordinating on complex tasks without central control, adapting to failures gracefully.
Colony brings these biological principles to software development. Each agent runs in its own isolated environment — a colony. The mycelium layer handles orchestration, networking, and state. The result is a system that scales naturally, fails gracefully, and feels organic to use.
Built with precision
Gleam + OTP
The mycelium layer. Functional, fault-tolerant, built on Erlang's proven actor model. Decades of reliability engineering in telecom systems.
Rust
The Stem terminal interface. Memory-safe, blazing fast. For power users who prefer staying in the terminal or working over SSH.
SolidJS
The Bloom web dashboard. Fine-grained reactivity, minimal runtime overhead. Real-time collaboration without the framework bloat.
Development environments managed with Nix Flakes — fully reproducible, declarative, and consistent across every machine.
Built in Switzerland
Headquartered in Switzerland. Strong privacy laws, a neutral jurisdiction, and an engineering culture that prioritizes getting things right over moving fast and breaking them.
Source-available, eventually open
Colony will be licensed under the Functional Source License (FSL). When we launch:
- The source code will be publicly available to read, fork, and learn from
- Non-production use will be free and unrestricted
- Commercial use requires a paid license (see our planned pricing)
- After 2 years, each release automatically converts to Apache 2.0 — fully open source
The repository is currently private during pre-launch development. Why FSL? We want to build a sustainable business while contributing to the open source community. The FSL gives us runway to build great software, while ensuring it eventually becomes freely available to everyone.
This aligns with our Swiss values: long-term thinking, transparency, and contributing to the commons.
The people
Small team, deep roots
Distributed systems, developer tools, and functional programming. Building from Switzerland with the conviction that AI agents deserve better infrastructure.
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