LittleHorse Enterprises
Because Every Enterprise Needs a Command Center.
LittleHorse is the Business-as-Code platform that gives engineering teams a single source of truth for how their distributed systems interact—with the governance, observability, and agility that modern enterprises demand.
Our Origin
Born from frustration with the status quo
Every engineering team building on microservices knows the pain: retries bolted on as afterthoughts, Saga patterns hand-rolled across services, hours lost tracing failures across distributed systems, and nobody in the company who can explain the end-to-end business process.
Infrastructure-as-Code tools like Terraform solved these problems for infra teams. But for application developers composing business processes across services? There was nothing.
That's why Colt McNealy started LittleHorse over the 2021 holiday break—to build a platform where entire business processes could be defined, versioned, and observed as code. Not YAML. Not drag-and-drop. Real, testable, reviewable code that compiles into a living, visual representation of your business.
Our Journey
From Idea to Platform
The Idea
Over the holiday break, Colt McNealy—frustrated after years of building fragile microservice integrations—started prototyping a platform to put engineers back in the saddle of their distributed architecture.
Initial Prototypes
The first version of the LittleHorse Kernel came to life: a workflow engine built on Apache Kafka that could define entire business processes as code, not YAML or drag-and-drop diagrams.
Open-Sourced
As a company built by engineers, for engineers, we open-sourced the LittleHorse Kernel on GitHub—free for production use—because that's what we expect from software we rely on ourselves.
Enterprise Adoption
Organizations across financial services, healthcare, and logistics began running LittleHorse in production, proving the platform's reliability at enterprise scale.
The Saddle Command Center
LittleHorse expanded beyond the Kernel into a full platform—Pony ID, Harness Connect, StreamSense—giving enterprises everything they need to compose, connect, and govern distributed applications.
Our Values
What we believe
Developer-First
We're engineers who build tools for engineers. Every design decision starts with developer experience—because if it's not easy to adopt, it doesn't matter how powerful it is.
Radical Transparency
Our Kernel is open-source, our roadmap is public, and our community has a direct line to our engineering team. We build in the open because trust is earned, not assumed.
Uncompromising Reliability
Mission-critical systems demand mission-critical infrastructure. We engineered fault tolerance, security, and horizontal scalability into LittleHorse from day one.
Business Value Over Busywork
Engineers shouldn't spend sprints wrestling with retries, dead-letter queues, and distributed tracing. We handle the undifferentiated heavy lifting so teams can ship features that matter.
Our Vision
Business-as-Code
Infrastructure-as-Code revolutionized how teams manage servers, networks, and security policies. Business-as-Code does the same for application logic—giving you governance, observability, and agility for your distributed business processes.
With LittleHorse, your entire order pipeline, onboarding flow, or AI agent orchestration lives in version-controlled code that compiles into a visual graph anyone on the team can understand. No more hunting through Slack channels to figure out which service calls which.
Read the Business-as-Code manifesto →The Team
Built by engineers, for engineers
Colt McNealy
Founder & CEO
Original author of the LittleHorse Kernel. Former distributed systems engineer with deep Apache Kafka expertise. Passionate about putting developers back in the saddle of their application architecture.
GitHub
Scott McNealy
Investor & Advisor
Founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems—the company that brought the world Java, NFS, and SPARC. Scott advises LittleHorse on strategy, go-to-market, and scaling an enterprise software company.
Mitchell Henderson
Solutions Architect
Software industry veteran with deep expertise in Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, and systems modernization across financial services, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing.
GitHubOpen source at our core
The LittleHorse Kernel is open-source and free for production use. We believe the best infrastructure earns adoption through transparency—not vendor lock-in. Our code, roadmap, and community are all open for you to explore.
Get Started. It's Easy and Free.
Ready to write your business logic as code?