One founder. One opinionated thesis.
Open source by default.
Serac Labs is the company behind the open-source serac build agent for ServiceNow. We are early, small, and explicit about how we think the next decade of platform work gets done.
Regulated platforms like ServiceNow do not survive a closed agent that pretends to know the schema. The senior developers who keep these instances alive already know which update set will break P1 during month-end close. They do not need a copilot that hides its reasoning behind an API key.
So we put the reasoning in readable prompts and ship the planner as code you can fork. The agent runs human-in-the-loop by default. Every write is reviewable, every run is replayable, and the platform-specific knowledge ships in the open repo, not in a private model we hold over you.
Portable is part of the contract. The agent ships under Apache License 2.0 — genuinely open source: read it, fork it, self-host it on Day 0, even build a service on it. No carve-outs, no anti-resale clause, no asterisk on the word "open." Bring your own LLM, your own vault, your own observability stack. If a future version of Serac ever forces you onto our cloud to keep using it, we have failed our own thesis. Our business is the hosted portal, the deep ServiceNow domain layer, and the community around it — not a license that locks you in. The agent's job is to give a developer a sharper toolbelt, not to become the developer. Anything that drifts from that is wrong on purpose. The longer version of this argument lives in the manifesto.
Niels van der Werf
I spent most of my career as a ServiceNow developer. Two years ago I started snow-flow, a small CLI that handled the parts of the day I kept doing by hand: stitching update sets, reading flows that nobody documented, pattern-matching across instances I had seen before. It was a side tool. It got used more than I expected.
What I learned shipping it for two years is that the interesting problem is not "can a model write a business rule." The interesting problem is everything around that: how the model gets the right schema, who reviews the diff, where the credentials live, what happens when the agent is wrong, and how a developer keeps control while still moving faster. Snow-flow grew into something denser than a CLI, and at some point it needed a company behind it.
That company is Serac Labs. Today it is one founder writing code and email in Amsterdam, and a handful of roles open on the careers page. I'm honest about the stage. If you are senior, opinionated about regulated platforms, and want to shape the first version of this — you are early enough to matter.
What you can expect from me as a founder: I read every issue on the repo. I respond to email at [email protected]. I take roadmap input seriously, especially from ServiceNow developers who have lived through the kinds of migrations that do not show up in vendor demos. The product gets better when the people closest to the work shape it.
Serac Labs B.V.
Amsterdam, founded 2024.
- What we build
- Open-source developer tools for ServiceNow and adjacent regulated platforms.
- Stage
- Early. One founder, hiring the first engineers. No outside capital yet.
- Legal entity
- Serac Labs B.V. (KvK pending)
- Registered
- Amsterdam, Netherlands.
- License
- Core agent is Apache License 2.0 — OSI-approved open source, no carve-outs. Prompts, planner, and connectors live in the public repo.
Talk to us.
General questions, partnership ideas, anything else: [email protected]. Code, issues, and PRs live on github.com/serac-labs. We reply from real names, in working hours, in plain text. If you want to talk to the founder directly, the email above goes to my inbox.