Alvin Sng

"You need to meet Matan Grinberg, I am trying to put $70M into his new round." That is how I got introduced to Matan. When you get a message like that, you take it seriously. So I went for a walk with Matan in Hyde Park. 5 mins into the walk, I asked to invest $10M (he reduced my check size!!). I knew after about 2 mins, but the other 3 mins were me playing it slightly cool!! Matan is fricking wild, he is a string theorist and PHD physicist who dropped out following one insane conversation with Shaun Maguire. Now he is running one of the fastest-growing companies in all of enterprise software. Following the round, I sat down with Matan and have condensed my notes into 8 of my biggest lessons from the discussion: 1. The future belongs to resource allocators, not headcount managers. The biggest question for every exec over the next 24 months is not how many people to hire. It's how to allocate dollars, tokens and talent against the outcomes that actually matter. 2. Every company will be able to build almost anything. The moat is no longer "we know how to build this and you don't." The moat becomes focus: knowing what not to build and where to concentrate scarce attention. 3. The age of the polymath is back. AI lowers the cost of expertise acquisition. The winners won't be narrow specialists. They'll be people who can connect engineering, product, marketing, sales and strategy into one system. 4. The best engineers will look more like founders. The future engineer isn't measured by lines of code. They're measured by ownership of business outcomes. Agency, judgment and customer understanding become more valuable than technical memorisation. 5. Most enterprises are entering the "AI hangover" phase. First came AI adoption at all costs. Now boards are asking the harder question: "What ROI are we actually getting from all these tokens?" The next wave is optimisation, not experimentation. 6. Open-source models will be far more important than most people think. Many tasks don't require frontier intelligence. The companies that win will intelligently route work across models, matching cost, speed and quality to the job at hand. 7. Great sales and marketing matter more, not less, in an AI world. One of Matan's strongest beliefs: name a legendary company with terrible sales or marketing. You can't. Product is the entire customer journey—from first impression to tenth renewal—not just the software. 8. The biggest bottleneck isn't technology. It's human behaviour. The infrastructure is moving fast. The models are improving weekly. The hardest thing to change is how people work, make decisions, and adopt new tools. Technology isn't the constraint anymore. Humans are. Huge thanks to Matt Miller, Chad Peets, Madison Faulkner, Pat Grady for helping to make this happen. (Links in comments)

In 2023, we launched Factory with the mission to bring autonomy to software engineering. While others were using models to speed up coding, we set out to deploy autonomous Droids across the enterprise software development lifecycle. Today we are announcing the next phase in the future of software engineering. Improving the productivity of individual engineers is no longer enough. Unlocking organization-wide productivity requires an interconnected, agent-native, end-to-end system. This system must improve over time by observing itself. The incremental units of this system are AI agents. This system will be built by engineers, and in turn will build their software. This system is the software factory. A robust software factory must have: Model Independence. Every model has a different trade-off of cost, performance, and speed. No one model fits every need within an enterprise. Your software factory must allow your organization to deliberately choose different models, or rely on a Router to automatically (or rule-based) select the best* model for any given task. As models commoditize, costs decrease while speed and performance increase. Sovereign Intelligence. You must be the sovereign of your software factory. Whether fully hosted in the cloud, bring-your-own-key, self-hosted data plane, EU-specific, or completely air-gapped with no external network access. Sovereignty means more than choosing where the system runs. It means owning a system that learns from itself, feeding every agent session, code review, and resolved incident back into the loop. The more you invest in your software factory, the more capable it becomes, and that capability stays with you, inside your walls, under your control. Continual Learning and Self-Improvement. Every stage of the software development lifecycle must be instrumented. When code review, security analysis, documentation, QA, and incident response all run on the same platform, they share the same agent core, the same model router, the same organizational context. A security finding informs the code review. A deployment triggers a documentation update. An incident correlates with the PR that caused it. Every additional automation, integration, or customization flows to the entire organization at once. The router itself learns to optimizes resources. The assembly line should span the full floor of the software factory. We have been building software factories with our customers for the last few months. Software factories are already in production across the world’s largest organizations including NVIDIA, EY, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, Adyen, Blackstone, Wipro, and more. Today we are expanding this functionality with visibility to manage your software factory directly in the Factory Desktop App. Software factories are not built in a day, but the best day to start building your Factory is today. Link below!

Today, we are excited to announce our $150M Series C led by Khosla Ventures with strong participation from Sequoia Capital, Blackstone, Insight Partners, Evantic Capital, Abstract Ventures, 20VC, NEA, and Mantis VC. This puts Factory's valuation at $1.5B and will accelerate our investment in research, product, and global go-to-market. The job is not finished. Long live developers.

Today we're releasing the Factory desktop app. A native interface for autonomous AI agents that work across every part of your software business. 1/ Droid Computers Every Droid gets a persistent machine it can call home. Register a Droid Computer in the cloud, or on your device at home. Access it from anywhere easily via the web, desktop, or mobile. 2/ Computer Use Droids in the desktop app control other applications. They navigate VS Code, interact with browser tabs, read documents, open excel, and work with whatever is running on your desktop. 3/ Multi-Agent Sessions Run Droids across multiple projects at once. The sidebar lets you switch between active sessions, monitor progress, and jump back into any Droid's work without losing context. 4/ AI-Native Visualization Droids decide how to present their work. They render Mermaid diagrams, charts, tables, dashboards, and metrics directly in the conversation. The UI is dynamic and generated by Droid. Enterprise teams adopt Droid 2x faster when both CLI and desktop are available. Users who work across both interfaces run 4.6x more sessions than CLI-only users. They're not splitting time. They're doing more total work. Available today on macOS and Windows for all Factory plans.

Fast Company has named Factory in The World's Most Innovative Companies 2026, in the artificial intelligence category. Honored to be included alongside many of the greatest companies of our time. #FCMostInnovative

Turn a meeting note into code. Granola now connects to Factory.

Had a blast speaking at NVIDIA #GTC this week. Great discussion with Chase Overlie, Pete Florence, Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, Fabian Hedin, and Maithra Raghu. We covered how we are ensuring quality for agents in all domains and how the job landscape will be changing as agents increase leverage across the board. These are particularly pressing questions as the world's largest enterprises are adopting agent-native software development. Thank you Jensen Huang for hosting us! It's been a privilege working with Nvidia and having them as both customers, research partners, and investors over the last year.