Conference Presentation, Interview, Fireside Chat
Fireside Chat with Matan Grinberg, Founder & CEO of Factory | RAISE Summit 2026
- Matan Grinberg is the CEO and founder of Factory, a company founded in 2023 with the mission to automate software engineering grunt work.
- Grinberg's background includes a decade as a theoretical physicist specializing in string theory and quantum gravity before pivoting to AI research and code generation.
- The decision to launch Factory was triggered by a graduate seminar on program synthesis and a direct insistence from Sequoia partner Sean McGuire to drop out of his PhD program.
- Factory's core product philosophy emphasizes meeting developers where they are in their workflow (VS Code, Cursor, Vim, Emacs) rather than forcing tool adoption.
- The company operates as a model-agnostic router, allowing enterprises to dynamically select the most cost-effective or performant model for specific tasks.
- Factory distinguishes itself as the only fully on-premises autonomous software agent platform, critical for highly regulated industries and data sovereignty.
- Enterprise adoption accelerated significantly in late 2023 following the release of "Product 2025" on September 26, driven by better model performance and increased organizational readiness.
- Factory reports enterprise adoption growth from 10 to 10,000 users within three months for certain accounts, demonstrating rapid scale in the enterprise sector.
- A major value proposition is preventing vendor lock-in and reducing token spend; one customer previously spent hundreds of thousands monthly on inefficient OpenAI queries before routing switched to optimized models.
- Grinberg predicts that open models will eventually account for over 90% of all tokens used, while frontier closed models will shrink to roughly 10% due to cost and speed advantages.
- In response to geopolitical shifts, such as US restrictions on model access in Europe, Factory supports sovereign deployments by allowing clients to bring their own models, cloud infrastructure, and machines.
- Factory is addressing legacy code migration, having deployed forward-engineering teams to help a customer migrate critical COBOL codebases in months rather than years.
- The company identifies "being too careful" and "gatekeeping" AI usage as primary pitfalls for enterprises adopting autonomous engineering.
- Grinberg uses Factory's "droid" agents to automate his own productivity, including auto-drafting email replies based on conversation history and tracking follow-ups from call transcripts.
- Non-software use cases for Factory are emerging, with one customer's finance team utilizing the platform for productivity tasks.
- Factory secured backing from Avant Capital, which facilitated the company's transition from research to commercial scale.