Rowboat Labs

Rowboat Labs builds an open-source, local-first AI coworker that turns everyday work into a living knowledge graph. Founded in 2024 by Arjun Maheswaran and Ramnique Singh and backed by Y Combinator (S24), the Bengaluru-based team indexes email, meetings, Slack, and notes into plain Markdown files with Obsidian-style backlinks, people, companies, projects, and topics become nodes that update as you work. Instead of forcing users onto another cloud SaaS, Rowboat runs on the user's machine. Bring your own model via Ollama or LM Studio, or connect ChatGPT, Claude, and other APIs. Built-in work surfaces include an email client, meeting note-taker, browser, and code mode, plus MCP support for custom tools. Background agents can run on schedules or events like new email. The product has shipped in public with multiple Hacker News launches and crossed 15,000+ GitHub stars under an Apache 2.0 license. Rowboat is initially targeting individual knowledge workers and developers before expanding into the enterprise market, a rare India-built open-source AI infra layer with global developer mindshare.