SAN FRANCISCO: Factory Inc. announced Tuesday the release of Droids, a new class of AI software development agents, following the product’s top ranking on the Terminal Bench, a standard industry benchmark.
The company also announced it has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by NEA and Sequoia Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, J.P. Morgan, and angel investors including Frank Slootman, Nikesh Arora, and Aaron Levie.
Factory positions its platform as a flexible alternative to AI coding tools that lock developers into a single programming environment or AI model. The Droids agents are designed to be integrated into various tools developers already use, such as terminal commands, integrated development environments (IDEs), Slack, and Linear.
“Agent-native development presents the most substantive shift in software development since the move to the cloud,” said Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of Factory. “Agents will not replace developers, but developers who are fluent with agents will rapidly outleverage and outpace developers who are not.”
Unlike tools focused solely on code generation, Factory’s Droids are built to handle tasks across the software development lifecycle, including migrations, feature development, code review and incident response. The system integrates with an organization’s engineering stack—such as GitHub, Jira and Datadog—to create context for the AI agents.
Factory said early customers, which include Ernst & Young, MongoDB and Bayer, are reporting significant efficiency gains, such as 31-times faster feature delivery and a 95.8% reduction in incident resolution times.
“Factory is demonstrating what no other agentic coding platform has: that enterprises will adopt and scale this technology when it delivers real value,” said Madison Faulkner, a partner at NEA, in a statement.
The new funding will be used to expand product capabilities and grow enterprise adoption, the company said.
Factory was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in San Francisco.