Factory

Introduction

Factory is an agent-native software development platform built around Droid — a sophisticated self-directed coding agent that operates across CLI, desktop, cloud, and CI/CD environments. Founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes, Factory raised a $150M Series C at a $1.5B valuation from Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Blackstone, Insight Partners, and others. Droids are used daily by hundreds of thousands of developers at organizations including Nvidia, Adobe, EY, Palo Alto Networks, Groq, Chainguard, and Adyen.

Unlike single-surface tools, Factory positions itself as the operating system for AI-assisted development — a platform where self-directed agents plan, implement, test, review, and ship code. Droid is model-agnostic, supporting GPT-5, Claude Opus and Sonnet, Gemini, Kimi K2.5, and open-weight models via BYOK.

Key Features

Droid is Factory's core agent. It understands natural language prompts, plans implementation strategies, writes code, runs tests, validates results, and commits changes — all within a single session or across coordinated multi-session workflows.

Missions are Factory's flagship capability for long-horizon independent work. Describe a goal like "build a CRM" or "migrate this PHP codebase to TypeScript," and a Droid orchestrator decomposes the work into milestones and features, spawns parallel worker sessions, coordinates handoffs through git, validates at every step, and recovers from failures automatically.

Droid has run Missions for up to 16 days in production.

Droid Computers provide persistent, long-lived compute environments — either Factory-managed cloud machines or your own hardware (BYOM) — where Droids run continuously in the background.

Custom Droids (subagents) let teams create specialized agents with their own prompts, tool access, and models that the main Droid can delegate work to. Combined with Skills (reusable capabilities), AGENTS.md (project-level context files), MCP support, Hooks, and Plugins, Factory offers deep extensibility.

Automated Code Review and Droid Shield (secret detection) ship built-in, with Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS integration adding AI-powered security scanning for enterprise customers.

Architecture

Factory operates across multiple surfaces from a shared platform. The Droid CLI is the primary interface — a terminal-based agent that runs locally or headless in CI/CD via Droid Exec. The Factory Desktop App provides a graphical interface with session management, chat, and code editor integration. IDE extensions bring Droid into VS Code, JetBrains, and Zed through ACP (Agent Communication Protocol). The Factory model router automatically selects the best model for each task, optimizing for speed, cost, and capability.

The Deferred Context Engine is a system that keeps tool schemas, MCP definitions, skills, and plugins accessible without loading everything into context on every turn — dramatically reducing token consumption and improving response times.

Installation & Setup

curl -fsSL https://app.factory.ai/cli | sh

# Or download the Factory Desktop App
# from https://factory.ai/product/desktop

After installation, run droid auth login to authenticate. The CLI walks you through connecting to your repositories, configuring models, and setting up integrations. A /readiness-report command evaluates your repository's autonomy maturity and suggests configuration improvements.

Usage

# Start an interactive Droid session
droid

# Inside the session, use natural language:
# "Add rate limiting to the API endpoint /api/orders"
# "Write tests for the payment module"
# "Investigate the production memory leak in auth-service"

# Enter a multi-session Mission
/enter-mission

# Review local code changes
/review

For CI/CD and automation, Droid Exec runs non-interactively:

# Run a specific task in CI
droid exec "Update all dependencies to their latest versions"

Comparison

Compared to Devin, Factory offers a broader surface area (CLI + desktop + IDE + cloud + CI/CD) and more advanced extensibility (Skills, Custom Droids, Hooks, Plugins). Devin is a web-first self-directed agent; Factory lets you work from any surface.

Compared to Claude Code, Factory provides richer enterprise features (SSO/SCIM, audit logging, airgapped deployment, SOC 2 certification) and the Mission system for multi-day workflows. Claude Code is simpler to start with but less configurable at scale.

Compared to Cursor, Factory is not an IDE — it's a platform that integrates into your existing editor. Cursor replaces your editor with an AI-native one; Factory augments your current workflow with self-directed agents that work alongside your IDE of choice.

Conclusion

Factory treats software development as an agent-native problem. It doesn't just autocomplete code — it plans, builds, tests, reviews, and ships software independently, across any surface, with any model, at any scale. With $150M in Series C funding and a growing enterprise customer base, Factory is betting that this is how most software will be built going forward.

Further Reading

• Factory Documentation
• Factory Missions Announcement
• Deferred Context Engine
• Series C Announcement
• Droid CLI Reference
• Agent Arena Benchmarks
• Factory on GitHub