Menlo Ventures backs Factory in bid to automate the entire software lifecycle

Menlo Ventures on Monday announced that it is investing in Factory, a startup building a platform to automate the full software development lifecycle. The venture firm said in a blog post that it is joining the company's latest financing. The size of the round, Factory's valuation and the other investors involved were not disclosed.

Factory's platform covers planning, code review, testing, security and documentation, areas that Menlo said take up most of an engineer's time. The investment firm said the platform already serves hundreds of thousands of developers at enterprises such as Nvidia and Blackstone.

"Coding has gone from $550M to $30B+ in two years, but generation was only one piece. Factory closes the rest of the loop with a shared, governed, model-agnostic platform," Menlo said in a post on X.



Factory offers a common enterprise knowledge base and guardrails for all agents and users, along with sovereign deployment. Customers can choose which models run, balancing intelligence requirements and cost.

The company was cofounded by CEO Matan Grinberg, who left a theoretical physics PhD at UC Berkeley, and CTO Eno Reyes, previously a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face.