San Francisco-based startup Factory has acquired $50 million in Series B funding to carry forward with its goal of making development genuinely agent-native and not dependent on IDEs or large language models (LLMs). This is a big step forward for AI-powered software development.
The investment, which was led by NEA and Sequoia Capital and supported by NVIDIA, JP Morgan, and well-known angel investors including Frank Slootman, Nikesh Arora, and Aaron Levie, pushes Factory into the top tier of AI-first developer platforms. The company wants to use the fresh money to speed up its goal of creating a flexible, open ecosystem where developers may delegate their coding chores instead of micromanaging them.
Bye Bye Lock-In: Hello, Agnostic Development
Factory is different from other AI coding assistants because it doesn’t limit developers to a certain editor, model, or workflow. The business produced a new kind of self-sufficient development agent called Droids that can work with any toolchain, language model, or development environment.
This versatility lets developers work from Slack, VS Code, IntelliJ, Linear, or even the terminal itself. They may choose the LLM or IDE that works best for the job and switch between them easily when they need to.
Matan Grinberg, Factory’s co-founder and CEO, believes, “Agent-native development is the biggest change in software engineering since the cloud.”
“Agents won’t take the place of developers, but developers who know how to use agents will be better than those who don’t.”
From Autocomplete to Self-Driving Engineering
Many tools now have autocomplete or AI-generated snippets, but Factory’s Droids do a lot more than that. These agents can do full jobs throughout the software development lifecycle, such as:
- Moving and changing code
- Adding new features
- Documentation and questions and answers for code
- Reviews of code
- Responding to incidents
Droids collect organizational context exactly like a seasoned team member. They are extensively integrated into the engineering stack, from GitHub, Jira, Slack, Datadog, and Sentry, to Google Drive. That understanding of context lets them know about code conventions, dependencies, and architectural choices before they act.
Enterprise Adoption, Real Results
Big companies including NVIDIA, MongoDB, Bayer, Zapier, and Clari have already started using Factory’s platform. And the effects are amazing:
- 31 times faster delivery of features
- 95.8% less time needed for migration
- 95.8% decline in manual on-call solutions
- Better code quality all around
These data show that engineering workflows are changing in a big way. Developers will now focus on high-leverage jobs while agents take care of the rest.
Agnostic by Design: Making Engineering Teams Ready for the Future
Factory’s platform is completely agnostic, which is one of its main new features. This means that it doesn’t care about LLMs, development environments, interfaces, or infrastructure. This isn’t just a matter of personal choice; it’s a smart step to make sure teams are ready for the future in an ecosystem that is changing quicker than ever.
- Want to switch to a different LLM because of price, privacy, or performance? Not an issue.
- Need to use multiple IDEs with different teams? Done.
- Do you want to run compliance checks locally instead of in the cloud? The factory supports that as well.
This level of independence is very important for governance, compliance, and cost management, especially in businesses and places where rules are strict.
The New Stack: Using Agents for Elastic Engineering
The factory’s long-term goal is obvious but ambitious: to become the default operational layer for developing software that works with agents. Its new hiring in engineering, research, and go-to-market (GTM) will help make this ambition a reality by improving Droids’ organizational context, adding more integrations, and making the developer experience better.
It’s not just the technology that makes Factory different; it’s also the way they think. The company is not making another walled garden. Instead, it is making tools that help teams work together and give engineers the power to control agents instead of being replaced by them.
As Madison Faulkner, a partner at NEA, says:
“Factory is showing the world that businesses will use and grow this technology when it really helps them.”
They are the best in their field for agent-native development since they have both enterprise traction and scalable unit economics.
The Road Ahead
Factory intends to make its Droids even more modular and smart with this fresh money. This will help the company become a key part of the next generation developer stack. Factory’s strategy is refreshingly poised for the future in a sector that is dealing with LLM changes, security issues, and higher demands for delivery speed.
As engineering teams all around the world switch to an agent-first way of thinking, Factory’s bet on giving developers independence across models, editors, and workflows might make it the platform of choice for anyone who want to build on their own terms.