The Hoody Evolution

Hoody was a privacy company. Per-App VPNs for Windows (a first, and yes, we hate Windows, but we shipped it anyway), browsing containers that beat fingerprinting, bulletproof SOCKS5 proxies, quantum-resistant encryption. 20 people. $3.2M raised.

One lesson stuck: real privacy needs full isolation. Not tunnels. Containers. That idea became the seed of everything after.

GPT-3.5 landed and most companies made chatbots. We used it to write infrastructure.

The method: put the model in a loop with end-to-end tests. Write, test, fail, fix, repeat. No magic. Just a faster version of what good engineers already do.

We built every core system this way: proxy layer, container lifecycle, Kit services, the SDK. Rust, C++, TypeScript. The AI made us faster. It produced remarkably ok code. It didn't replace us.

Not yet, anyway.

Better models, fewer iterations. Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet 3.5, GPT-4o, o1. We stopped assisting and started orchestrating. Agents running agents. Verification chains across repositories. We launched an anonymous AI gateway because even inference deserved privacy. No KYC unless genuinely forced to.

Tons of subscriptions on top of API tokens. Over $100K in inference costs across multiple providers. Not wasteful. This is how 3 people ship a platform that would normally take 50.

We launched Hoody AI. Anonymous inference proxy. Models up to Claude Sonnet 3.7. It hit #2 Product of the Week on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/products/hoody-ai). 50,000+ users signed up.

They came for the AI gateway. But underneath, they were already using our container infrastructure. Browsing containers, verifiable VPNs, isolated environments. The privacy product was built on top of something much bigger. We just hadn't seen it yet.

That was the real turn.

We pivoted entirely. The AI gateway was the proof, not the product. The product was everything underneath.

20 people to 3. Not a failure. A decision.

• 1 CTO. 20+ years shipping software, websites, and products. Privacy fanatic. Obsessed with code since childhood.
• 1 Head of Design. 20+ years in product design. The one who keeps pushing until every pixel is right. Annoying in the best way.
• 1 CEO. 20+ years building companies. The one who keeps saying "the world needs to know about this."
• 1 QA engineer on contract. Specialists as needed.
• Hundreds (thousands) of automated agents as permanent workforce.

We're all in. Morning to night. Except the CTO, who works evening to morning by choice. 8 monitors each. Smart glasses with agent notifications. Build broke? We know before coffee. PR ready? Already tested. Our agents run on Hoody, around the clock.

We weren't building a product. We were building the layer underneath all future products.

Every model, agent, and framework that comes next will still need to talk to a computer. That conversation happens over HTTP. HTTP/3 and QUIC are modern, fast, battle-tested. Browsers are the most sandboxed, secure, universal client ever built. We spent years modifying Chromium for our privacy products. That showed us: the browser isn't just a client. It's THE client.

We built the entire stack on that bet. We didn't want to ship fast and rebuild later. We wanted to build once, ship, and iterate at full speed on top. Terminals, files, watchers, versioning, snapshots, containers, kernel interception, MITM proxy. The foundation can't break anymore. Everything above it moves fast.

You're looking at it. This is not a landing page for something "coming soon." We just shipped.

Behind the scenes: 71+ repositories. Thousands of pages of documentation. What you get: 14 services. 400+ HTTP endpoints. A TypeScript SDK. A CLI with 820 commands. A WebOS. An inference proxy serving 300+ models. Running on your own rented bare-metal. Or use our free VMs for hobbying, side projects, and small websites.

3 people managing all of it. Hundreds (thousands) of agents. Running on the platform itself.

We don't vibe-code. We have procedures, verification pipelines, multi-agent orchestration. We review every line. This website, our docs, our deployment, our monitoring: all running on Hoody containers. We built the platform, then moved into it.

Privacy isn't the product anymore, but it's in the DNA:

• Bare-metal servers. Your machine. Not shared VMs.
• Unguessable 24-character hex URLs. Never in Certificate Transparency logs. If your client is secure, the URL itself is the key. No auth needed for quick access across devices. Practical and private by design. (But seriously, harden it the way you want with our extensive permission system. You should.)
• Encryption at rest. Realm isolation between containers.
• Everything that runs on your machine is open source. SDK, CLI, Workspaces. Apache 2.0. Because server-side code can't be verified regardless. What runs on your client, you should be able to read.
• Proprietary components including our custom 7.0.0-rc5-hoody kernel and parts of the Kit backend. Our philosophy: open-source progressively under strong licensing. We want to build a company before someone forks it out from under us. If you've built something from scratch, you get it.

We stopped selling privacy. We started building on it.

Because almost nobody talks about this part honestly. The small team plus agents playbook isn't theoretical for us. It's Tuesday.

AI changed everything. Every company is restructuring around it, whether they admit it or not. We just did it earlier and more radically than most.

We grew up on the early internet. We loved it then. We love building for it now. 60+ combined years of experience between us. We don't need to be the biggest. We're proving that experienced builders with the right infrastructure and the right agents don't need a 200-person team. Hoody is our proof. It can be yours too. And we'll be right there to help you get there.

Try what we built: free machine, no credit card, Hoody.

Want to talk: hello@hoody.com. We read everything.