Chamath Palihapitiya is stepping back into a full-time operating role for the first time since he left Facebook, and he is bringing $135 million with him. 8090, the AI-native software company he founded in January 2024, announced on June 26, 2026 that it closed a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures, capital the Redwood City, California-based startup says will fund a global rollout of its flagship product, Software Factory — a platform built to let human engineers and teams of AI agents build and change enterprise software together under what the company calls human-led oversight.
The round drew a roster of Silicon Valley heavyweights beyond its lead investor. Participants included Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo, David Sacks' Craft Ventures, David Friedberg's The Production Board, and Jason Calacanis' Launch, alongside angel investors Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, Cliff Robbins, Shyam Ravindran, Thomas Laffont, and Abhi Arun. Alongside the financing, Palihapitiya announced on X that he is taking the CEO title at 8090, moving from a board seat into daily operating control of the company for the first time since his Facebook days.
"AI can write code. The hard part of enterprise software is keeping fifty agents and a hundred engineers changing the same complex system every week without it pulling apart," said Chamath Palihapitiya, cofounder and CEO of 8090. "The best companies in the world build custom software that captures what makes them unique. We built Software Factory on the belief that every organization should be able to do the same thing. AI should expand access to intelligence, expertise, and execution capacity so more people and organizations can build, create, and compete. That's the opportunity we're pursuing at 8090."
Software Factory works by turning natural-language documents into shippable code. Developers first write "Requirements" describing an application's purpose and features, then more technical "Blueprints" that spec out individual components such as a database or a payment engine. From there, 8090's Agent Skills toolkit — a set of coding instructions, scripts, and related resources — lets third-party AI agents translate those documents into tested, production-ready code, with updates triggered simply by editing the underlying natural-language spec. The company also runs its own enterprise delivery arm, using the same platform to design, build, host, and maintain custom systems for large customers in regulated industries, work it says hardens the product against real-world legacy complexity.
That delivery business has already produced some striking case studies. 8090 says it reverse-engineered more than 18 million lines of COBOL and Assembly behind a healthcare billing engine into over 300,000 plain-English rules in 40 days. A publicly traded health insurer used the platform to turn its payable-claims rules into a deterministic pre-filter, routing more than 80% fewer claims to a pay-per-catch vendor and avoiding more than $20 million in costs over four years. A life sciences customer cut time-to-market for a new diagnostic from five years to four, and a manufacturer brought more than 10,000 parts under real-time validation with automatic approvals reaching over 1,000 users. The company says it stays accountable for these systems in production after go-live, and it has separately described a partnership with EY to orchestrate a mesh of AI agents across the full software development lifecycle under human oversight.
Explaining his return to a full-time role, Palihapitiya drew a direct line to his career-defining stretch at Facebook. "Since I left Facebook, I was waiting for a moment like this to return to a full-time operating role," he wrote. "I am convinced that what we are building now is even more important, so there was no decision to make except to be all in." In a company blog post announcing the raise, he added that 8090 works with "the biggest, hardest, most demanding customers in the most regulated industries: healthcare, insurance, life sciences, aerospace, energy, manufacturing, financial services, and the United States government," and that companies working with 8090 "grow faster, make more money, and run more efficiently than their competitors."
Why It Matters
8090's raise is a bet on a specific thesis: that the bottleneck in enterprise AI is no longer whether agents can write code, but whether organizations can trust, govern, and audit what those agents build at scale. Salesforce Ventures' decision to lead the round is telling — Salesforce sells directly into the same regulated, compliance-heavy enterprises 8090 targets, and its backing signals that "agent orchestration" platforms, not raw coding-agent speed, may be where the next layer of enterprise AI value accrues. Rather than competing with coding assistants like Cursor or GitHub Copilot on autocomplete speed, 8090 is positioning itself one layer up, selling the governance, traceability, and accountability that let boards, CEOs, and CFOs sign off on software built substantially by machines. In regulated industries — healthcare, insurance, government, financial services — that audit trail is not a nice-to-have; it is the actual product being purchased, since "the AI did it" is not an answer that satisfies a regulator when a system fails.
What to Watch
Watch how 8090 spends the capital: it has said the money will expand its commercial footprint, scale Software Factory globally, and build out infrastructure for enterprise adoption, potentially including training its own custom models the way Cursor-maker Anysphere did after starting on third-party AI. Watch whether Palihapitiya's shift from investor-chairman to full-time CEO changes the company's pace and public profile, particularly given his high-visibility platform on the All-In podcast and Social Capital. And watch the broader pattern: 8090's raise landed in the same stretch as Goldman Sachs' $110 million investment in audit-focused fintech Taktile, suggesting investors are increasingly pricing "auditable AI agents" as a distinct, fundable category in enterprise software — one worth watching for the next mega-round.
"AI can write code. The hard part of enterprise software is keeping fifty agents and a hundred engineers changing the same complex system every week without it pulling apart."- Chamath Palihapitiya, Co-founder and CEO, 8090