Warp (developer terminal)

Warp was founded by Zach Lloyd in June 2020 to rework the command-line terminal, a tool essentially unchanged since it first shipped in 1969. Lloyd had worked on Google Sheets at Google, co-founded SelfMade in 2016 and stepped down as its CTO in 2019, after which he settled on the terminal as the starting point for a developer tool.⁠[1]

Lloyd first persuaded his former Google colleague Shikhiu Ing to join as founding designer, then hired engineers Michelle Lim and Aloke Desai. The team spent six months during the pandemic building a version it was satisfied with, at one point scrapping the system and rewriting it from scratch in Rust to reach the speed expected of a terminal.⁠[1]

The company’s legal name is Denver Technologies, Inc., doing business as Warp.dev.⁠[2][3]

In July 2021 Lloyd announced Warp’s beta on Hacker News in a post titled “Warp: Fast, Rust-based terminal.” Criticism in the comments centered on logins, data privacy and security, and whether to pay for a terminal; within 24 hours of the post more than 10,000 developers had signed up to try it. Over the following year Warp iterated on the product in beta with small groups of users.⁠[1]

On April 5, 2022 Warp launched its public beta, initially for macOS only, with Windows and Linux versions planned. The product worked with shells such as zsh, fish and bash and offered a text-editor-like input experience, command autosuggestions, tabs, split panes and built-in SSH support, along with sharing of commands and workflows with teammates.⁠[4]

The same day Warp announced $23 million in total funding: a previously raised $6 million seed round led by GV with participation from Neo and BoxGroup, and a $17 million Series A led by Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field, with participants including Elad GilElad GilElad Gil is an entrepreneur, investor and author of High Growth Handbook. He co-founded Mixer Labs and Color, worked at Google and Twitter, runs the multistage investment firm Gil & Co, and co-hosts the No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo.Open the full entry, former LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry CEO Jeff Weiner and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff. The company said it would use the money to grow its engineering team and continue building the product.⁠[4][3]

Lloyd said at the time that the company’s mission was to “elevate developer productivity. It’s not to build the best terminal that’s ever existed,” with the terminal at the center of a broader platform. Within days of the public release, Warp’s user base grew to tens of thousands.⁠[4][1]

On June 21, 2023 Warp launched Warp Drive, a team collaboration feature that lets users save commands as workflows they can annotate, share and run on demand. The same day Lloyd announced a $50 million Series B led by Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, with Sequoia partner Andrew Reed joining the board. Existing investors including Dylan Field, GV, Neo, BoxGroup, Jeff Weiner and Marc Benioff participated, and Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry and Tobi LutkeTobias LütkeTobias Lütke, who also goes by Tobi Lütke, is a programmer, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Shopify, and a startup investor. He took part in the Ruby on Rails open-source community, has served as Shopify’s CEO since April 2008, and joined the board of Coinbase in 2022.Open the full entry joined as new angel investors.⁠[5]

That year Warp introduced Warp AI, an LLM-powered sidebar where users can ask for help remembering a command, fixing an error or working out the next step. At OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s first DevDay in November 2023, Romain Huet, OpenAI’s head of developer experience, used Warp as the terminal when showing the function calls behind a new assistant during the keynote.⁠[1]

Warp was officially released for Linux in February 2024, and in June 2024 it released “Agent Mode,” which lets users ask AI to carry out tasks directly in the terminal.⁠[1]

By December 2024 Warp had hundreds of thousands of developer users and paying customers among both individuals and enterprises; developers at companies including OpenAI, Atlassian, CiscoCiscoCisco Systems, Inc. is an American networking technology company, incorporated in 1984, headquartered in San Jose, California, and listed on Nasdaq.Open the full entry, Netflix and Salesforce used the product. Lloyd described a model of bottom-up user growth with revenue from companies and small teams paying for collaboration and intelligence features: “Monetization comes from companies wanting to pay to have their developers be more efficient and productive and working better together.”⁠[1]

In February 2025 Warp officially launched on Windows, with support for PowerShell, WSL and Git Bash and for x64 and ARM64. The company says Warp is written entirely in Rust and rendered directly on the GPU.⁠[6]

On June 24, 2025 Warp released Warp 2.0, which it called the first “Agentic Development Environment” (ADE), combining Code, Agents, Terminal and Drive in a single app with support for running and managing multiple AI agents in parallel. At launch the company published scores of 52% on Terminal-Bench and 71% on SWE-bench Verified for its coding agent and said Warp had more than half a million active users.⁠[7]

In September 2025 Warp launched Warp Code, adding an interface for reviewing agent-generated diffs, a lightweight file editor, and features such as Projects and WARP.md; in November it released Agents 3.0, adding “Full Terminal Use,” a /plan command for planning before execution, and integrations with SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry, Linear and GitHub Actions. The company said that by the end of 2025 Warp supported more than 20 models and its coding agent scored 61.2% on Terminal-Bench and 75.6% on SWE-bench Verified.⁠[6]

On February 10, 2026 Warp launched Oz, a cloud platform for running, managing and orchestrating coding agents. Agents run in sandboxed cloud environments powered by Docker, and each run generates a shareable link and audit trail; enterprise customers can choose self-hosted environments. Warp said at the time that more than 700,000 developers used its product, at companies including Docker, Ramp and Peloton and more than half of the Fortune 500.⁠[8]

On March 22, 2026 Warp announced that it had passed one million active developers and unveiled the Oz cloud platform.⁠[9]

On April 28, 2026 Warp open-sourced its core product, its agentic development environment, in the GitHub repository warpdotdev/warp under the AGPL license, with OpenAI as flagship sponsor of the repository. Users can submit feature requests and bug reports from within the product or on GitHub; public GitHub issues serve as the system of record for features, roadmap and discussion, with Oz agents triaging issues, drafting implementation plans, writing code and opening pull requests. Updates released alongside added support for open-weight models such as Kimi, MiniMax and Qwen.⁠[10][11]

Speaking as founder and CEO, Lloyd said that a diverse set of contributors combined with Oz agents running structured workflows “will produce a better product than we could build with our internal team alone.”⁠[10]

On August 18, 2026 Warp launched Warp Factories, in which a coordinating “foreman” agent routes work to specialized agents for triage, specifications, implementation and review, with human approval kept at key stages. Work can enter from GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Linear and Jira, and harnesses include Warp Agent, AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. The product is in early access for a limited set of teams, with pay-as-you-go usage priced at a 20% markup over API rates.⁠[12]

Warp describes Warp Factories as a new product separate from Warp Terminal, which remains its actively maintained flagship and ships with native Factory MCP support so engineers can start work locally and hand it off to a factory. The company said its own engineering team was then automating 20–30% of its pull requests through factories.⁠[11]

As of November 2026 Warp’s website lists its products as Warp Factories, Warp Terminal and Warp Agent CLI. The company describes its mission as empowering developers to ship better software more quickly and says it expects developers to become “tech leads” for groups of agents.⁠[13]

In its April 2026 company description, Warp lists its backers as including Sequoia Capital, GV, Sam Altman, Marc Benioff and Dylan Field.⁠[10]

Warp: Official website: https://www.warp.dev/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

X: Public account: https://x.com/warpdotdev (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/warpdotdev (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@warpdotdev (opens in a new window).⁠[13]