8090 Labs announced a $135 million Series A on June 29, led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from WndrCo, Craft Ventures, The Production Board, Launch, and angel investors including Nikesh Arora and Adam D'Angelo. Chamath Palihapitiya, previously a board member, has transitioned to CEO of the company he co-founded in January 2024.
The product, called Software Factory, is an AI-powered platform that produces production-grade enterprise code while preserving audit trails, access controls, and the compliance scaffolding that regulated buyers require. Stated customer verticals include healthcare, insurance, life sciences, aerospace, energy, manufacturing, financial services, and the US public sector.
The round sits alongside two other late-June themes. AI capital is concentrating in the 'control plane' around model deployment — code security, governance, identity, infrastructure — rather than in new foundation-model labs, and venture is increasingly willing to fund coding agents that target regulated industries instead of consumer or hobbyist developers. Software Factory competes most directly with Cognition's Devin, Cursor's enterprise tier, and Anthropic's Claude Code in the auditable-output segment.
Takeaway for learners: 'AI for developers' is splitting into two markets — one optimized for individual productivity, one for enterprise auditability — and the second is where most of the 2026 venture money is going. If you're building a portfolio project, picking a regulated domain and producing audit-friendly artifacts (test logs, change history, justification traces) is now a more differentiating skill than raw model output.