Meet Bunnyshell, Winner of Startups of The Year 2024 in Palo Alto

AI is writing more code than ever. But who’s making sure it runs?

We’re entering a new phase in software development — one where engineers no longer write most of the code. AI coding assistants like Copilot, Cursor, and Replit Ghostwriter are generating entire pull requests, functions, and infrastructure configurations. That’s great for speed. But dangerous for reliability.

In this new AI-driven development era, the bottleneck has shifted: it’s not about how fast code gets written. It’s about how fast it gets validated.

That’s where ephemeral environments come in.

Tell us about you.

At Bunnyshell, we’re building the Software Delivery Platform for the AI era — starting with one of the most frustrating problems in modern development: testing code you didn’t write.

As AI-generated code becomes the norm — with tools like Copilot, Cursor, Replit, and others writing entire pull requests — developers need a faster way to validate, debug, and deploy. Our mission is to make every pull request come with a production-like, ephemeral environment. Because in this new world, shipping faster isn’t about writing code — it’s about knowing it works.

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

We help developers trust the code they didn’t write.

AI is producing code at scale, but that comes with bugs, regressions, and broken pipelines. With Bunnyshell, every PR gets a full-stack, production-grade preview environment — in seconds. Teams can run automated tests, simulate real data, reproduce bugs, and share URLs with QA or PMs.

We're not just speeding up delivery. We’re rebuilding trust in the development cycle by making runtime validation part of the dev workflow.

What sets you apart from the competition?

Others give you CI pipelines. We give you actual, running systems — per pull request.

What makes Bunnyshell unique is the orchestration layer that turns Kubernetes clusters into on-demand environments for every branch, across microservices. We handle snapshots, self-healing, auto-teardowns, and integration with AI-driven dev tools.

We’re already used by open source powerhouses like ArgoCD and Sylius to speed up code review and testing across contributors — and thousands of startups rely on Bunnyshell to keep up with rapid AI-assisted dev cycles.

What does it mean for you to win this title?

It’s a signal that the world is paying attention to the future of development. We’re honored to be recognized — not just as a dev tool, but as a platform helping usher in the next phase of software: AI-assisted, environment-aware, and lightning-fast.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to set out for this mission?

We’re a team of hackers, builders, and platform nerds. Our engineers can spin up Kubernetes clusters blindfolded, and our customer success team speaks YAML fluently. What unites us is a belief that infrastructure should never block innovation — and that AI development needs real-time feedback loops.

Looking back, what milestone was the biggest turning point for your startup?

Our biggest shift was realizing we weren’t just solving staging problems. We were building infrastructure for AI-generated code. That realization pushed us to redesign the platform to support agent-based workflows, remote dev environments, and full-stack previews — not just for humans, but for AI copilots too.

What’s one valuable lesson you learned this year that you’d pass on to other startups?

Developers won’t wait. When AI generates five features before lunch, the rest of the toolchain needs to keep up. We learned to optimize cold-start performance, integrate tightly with GitHub, and make environment creation near-instant — because the feedback loop is now the bottleneck.

How do you envision your industry evolving in the coming years, and how will your startup stay ahead?

The future of dev isn’t just “AI-assisted.” It’s AI-directed. Human oversight, AI agents writing code, and ephemeral environments as the bridge between them. We believe the entire software delivery pipeline will revolve around what AI generates and how humans validate it. Bunnyshell is built to be the backbone of that pipeline.

How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2025?

We’re turning this recognition into momentum: speaking at conferences, collaborating with AI platform builders, and growing our community. We want every developer building with Copilot or Cursor to have access to environments that show their code actually works.

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2025?

• 100,000 developers using Bunnyshell for AI-generated code testing
• Partner with more OSS projects to offer Preview Environments-as-a-Service
• Open-source key parts of our orchestration engine

2024 has been crazy, with all the new techs, and all the geopolitics fluctuations. What are the impacts of these to your startup, and to your industry as a whole? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

It forced clarity. Between the AI boom and cloud cost spikes, teams had to rethink their toolchain. We adapted by making our ephemeral environments more efficient, cheaper, and tightly integrated with the new wave of AI development tools.

We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?

This platform has been one of the few that consistently highlights real startups solving real technical problems. It’s not fluff — it’s devs talking to devs. We love it.

Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?

If AI is writing the code, make sure your platform can prove it works.