Factory: The Platform for Agent-Native Development

“The great opportunity is not beating the latest benchmark – it is in building the enterprise abstraction which enables modernization of codebases. These abstractions will be AI-native tooling that go beyond code generation to deliver more automated code migration, continuous end-to-end review and testing, and a collaborative human-agent developer experience.”

- “Beyond Beating the SWE-Bench: How AI Will Modernize Enterprise Code” by Madison Faulkner and Maanasi Garg

Earlier this year, we pinpointed this to be a great opportunity in AI SDLC. Fast forward to today, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to announce our lead investment in a team relentlessly pursuing this vision. Factory has raised a $50M Series B financing^[1]  led by NEA along with Sequoia, J.P.Morgan, Nvidia, Abstract Ventures, Mantis VC, Ali Ghodsi, Chris Degnan, and Frank Slootman.

Renowned enterprise organizations including MongoDB, Ernst & Young, Zapier, Bilt Rewards, Clari, Bayer and more have become ardent customers of Factory, helping drive the 200% QoQ growth (from Factory) and strong enterprise retention that Factory has seen throughout 2025. Developers at the industry’s leading organizations are able to automate their full software development lifecycle using Factory’s Droids to autonomously complete tasks such as feature development, migrations, modernization projects, code review, and testing. And, spend on Factory is already starting to eat into the ~$250Bn that is spent annually in the US on software engineers⁽¹⁾, with customers choosing large contracts with Factory to empower every engineer with a team of agent engineers.

IDE Limitations

The IDE has been the primary software development interface for decades, despite lacking innovation and much investment until recent years. Although newer IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf have seen rapid adoption from offering the first wave of AI-enabled coding, the productivity gains from these IDE tools are still limited to ~20-40%⁽²⁾. A recent randomized controlled trial by METR even found that tools like Cursor slowed down developers by 19% when solving issues like bug fixes, features, and refactors⁽³⁾. Key factors behind the slowdown included worse performance for large and complex repos, and the tools’ failing to utilize important tacit knowledge or context. From a business lens, IDEs have become high churn products, with developers easily switching out these products to test the latest and driving margins down by competing with one another. Factory, on the other hand, enables production-grade Droids that are IDE and medium-agnostic, enabling enterprises to retain their autonomous and automated agents while switching IDEs.

A New Paradigm of Software Development

Factory is helping large enterprises bridge existing workflows to a new paradigm of software development that is several orders of magnitudes more impactful than we understand today. Factory empowers engineering teams to transform their SDLC by enabling end-to-end work with a suite of task-specific AI agents called “Droids” which enable:

1. Storing and effectively retrieving the enterprise memory: These agents intelligently unify all enterprise engineering context (from GitHub, Notion, Linear, Slack, Sentry, etc.) to improve output quality and to store enterprise memory.

2. Understanding and planning across complex codebases: Factory’s infrastructure enables high scalability and is the best performing development tool across multiple repositories, complexity and legacy code due to its reasoning architecture.

3. Choosing your own development interface or IDE: They also use an interface agnostic approach granting engineers flexibility in using the tool autonomously or for autocomplete, depending on the task.

In addition, Factory launched self-serve autonomous engineering with a commitment to developer experience that is unmatched in the software development stack. Factory has empowered thousands of developers over the past six months, and social sentiment is filled with dedicated accounts and enthusiastic reactions to platform breakthroughs:

• “At MongoDB, we’re already seeing big gains using Factory (powered by @VoyageAI) to accelerate dev workflows and automate tasks. This is just the beginning.”

  Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, on X

• “@FactoryAI launched Droids this week. I used it to clone Docusign in 20 minutes. That’s a $18B company.”

  Nathan Lands, Lore.com and Next Wave Podcast on X

• “Okay, Factory is actually the best background agent around.”

  Ben Tossell, Ben’s Bites on X

While Factory is built for developers, the platform is starting to see adoption across other functions as well. Data analysts, product managers, designers, and sales engineers all require regular interaction with their enterprise codebases. Factory’s Droids are building a new foundation not just for engineering productivity, but for enterprise wide productivity, enabling anyone to become a power user of their enterprise codebase.

Not only this, but Droid is the best available CLI agent on Terminal Bench today with a score of 58.75%.

The incredible enterprise traction and developer obsession acquired in this competitive space would not be possible without the intangible magic brought by founders Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes. Former friends at Princeton, the two reconnected in SF and committed to building the future of autonomous engineering–and haven’t looked back. Eno (CTO) has worked with the largest enterprises in the world deploying AI internally at Hugging Face, and uses his deep understanding of enterprise SDLC infrastructure to build the best coding agents for large codebases. And former physicist Matan (CEO) strikes a careful balance between high inertia momentum and solutions-oriented thought leadership. These two bring a rare combination of extreme determination and velocity that is magnetic to those around them, pulling in the best in engineering, developer relations, and go-to-market teams across the ecosystem.

We believe that Factory is driving a new era of software development, and we’re beyond excited to partner with Matan, Eno, the team and all the Droids driving this new era.

Factory is actively hiring across engineering, sales, research, and ops roles. If you’d like to join this powerhouse team, check out open roles on their career page.