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.
GitHub
Saúl Pińa
Software Engineer
Software engineer with extensive experience in Apache Kafka and the JVM ecosystem, working primarily in Java and Python. Author of kaskade, an open-source Kafka TUI. Fantasy reader, D&D player, and gamer at heart.
GitHub
Eduwer Camacaro
Software Engineer
Eduwer is a backend/distributed systems engineer with strong involvement in the Kafka ecosystem and event-driven system design. An ative contributor in the Kafka community, Eduwer has helped deliver key improvements that enhance Kafka Streams stability.
GitHub
Mateo Rojas
Software Engineer
Mateo is a software engineer with consulting and leadership background. Currently focused on managing the LittleHorse product roadmap. Drawing on years of experience building on Kafka, Mateo regularly gives back to the community with talks at Confluent Current and on the Confluent Developer Podcast.
GitHub
Mijaíl Rondon
Software Engineer
Mijaíl is a Full-Stack software engineer with a wide range of experience in various tech stacks. He is a language-agnostic software developer and architect with broad experience in technology and deep knowledge around microservices, infrastructure, and evolutive architectures.
GitHub
Jhosep Marín
Software Engineer
Java dev enthusiast focused on API design, end-to-end & high quality software delivery. He is an engineer with a keen eye for modernizing legacy systems. Foodie & gamer at heart.
GitHub
Jacob Snarr
Software Engineer
A core maintainer of the open source LittleHorse Kernel project. He works on API design across both server and client components, with a focus on building reliable, scalable systems and improving the developer experience.
GitHub
Mauricio Nasser
Software Engineer
Mauricio is a Software Engineer currently working on the Infrastructure Team. He specializes in designing, deploying, and optimizing cloud infrastructure to power amazing applications.
GitHub
Adrian Steinsleger
Software Engineer
Software engineer with a strong focus on frontend technologies, dedicated to connecting humans with machines. He currently works on Saddle UI, building intuitive and scalable user interfaces.
GitHub
Miguel Guaño
Software Engineer
Software Engineer with a strong focus on frontend technologies and digital craftsmanship. He currently works on Saddle, building the intuitive and seamless interfaces that empower users to navigate complex environments.
GitHub
Carlos Andrés Oquendo
Head of Professional Services
Carlos is a Software Engineer and Consultant, committed to deliver solutions that leverage LittleHorse technologies and Business-as-code to automate business processes and provide tangible value.
GitHub
Bryan Zuñiga
Software Engineer
Bryan is a Software Engineer on the Backend Team with a passion for systems architecture and automation. He leverages his expertise in distributed environments to deliver robust, high performance solutions.
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.
Start Codifying Your Business.
Ready to write your business logic as code?