Factory was founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes to build "Droids" — autonomous agents that take on software development work end to end rather than sitting inside an editor suggesting completions. A Droid can pick up a task, write the code, run the test suite, open and review a pull request, update documentation and carry the change toward deployment. The platform ships three ways to reach the same agents: a desktop app, the Droid CLI, and a Droid SDK for scripting agents into existing pipelines.
The company raised a $150M Series C at a $1.5B valuation in April 2026, led by Khosla Ventures with Sequoia, Blackstone and Insight Partners participating. Factory says Droids are used daily by developers at organizations including Nvidia, Adobe, EY, Palo Alto Networks, MongoDB and Zapier — a customer list that reflects the product's enterprise-first positioning.
That positioning shows in the governance surface. Business and Enterprise tiers add SSO, SAML/SCIM provisioning, zero data retention, audit logging and admin control over which models Droids may use, what autonomy level they operate at, and what network access they get. Enterprise adds on-premise deployment, customer-managed encryption keys and dedicated partitioned inference. An "agent-readiness" dashboard scores how prepared a given codebase is for agentic work, which is a more honest framing than most competitors offer.
Usage is the friction point. There is no free tier — signup gives a one-hour trial — and paid plans meter against overlapping 5-hour, 7-day and 30-day rolling rate limits rather than a single monthly number. Once standard usage is exhausted, work continues on the free open-weight Droid Core models or on prepaid credits from a $10 minimum. Droid Core genuinely stretches a plan, but the layered limits make budgeting less transparent than a flat quota would.
Key Benefits
- Whole-lifecycle coverage: Droids handle test runs, PR review and documentation, not only the code-writing step where most tools stop.
- Three interfaces, one agent: Interactive desktop work, terminal-driven sessions and programmatic SDK invocation all reach the same platform.
- Included open-weight fallback: Droid Core models keep agents working after metered usage runs out, at no extra charge.
- Governance built in: Autonomy levels, model allowlists and network policy are admin-configurable, which is what makes autonomous agents approvable in regulated orgs.
- Managed execution environments: Droid Computers give remote agents a clean, Factory-managed machine instead of a developer's laptop.
Use Cases
- Backlog burndown — Delegate well-specified tickets to Droids that implement, test and open PRs for human review, freeing engineers for design work.
- Automated PR review — Droids review incoming pull requests against repo conventions and flag issues before a human reviewer picks them up.
- Migration and modernization — Missions coordinate repetitive multi-repo changes such as framework upgrades or dependency migrations.
- Documentation upkeep — Agents regenerate stale docs and changelogs alongside the code changes that made them stale.
