8090 Labs Raises $135M, Chamath Steps In as CEO

The AI coding gold rush just minted another heavyweight. 8090 Labs, the Menlo Park startup building what it calls a "Software Factory" for enterprise programming teams, has raised a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures — and its founder, the well-known investor Chamath Palihapitiya, is stepping out of the backseat to run the company as chief executive.

The round drew a roster of brand-name backers alongside Salesforce Ventures: WndrCo, Craft Ventures, The Production Board and Jason Calacanis's LAUNCH all participated, as did angel investors including Palo Alto Networks chief executive Nikesh Arora and Quora founder Adam D'Angelo. The company, which Palihapitiya founded in January 2024, says it will spend the money on aggressive hiring, expanding its technical team and buying the high-performance compute it needs to scale.

8090's pitch is a deliberate swipe at the consumer-grade coding assistants that have dominated headlines. Rather than another autocomplete co-pilot, Software Factory is positioned as a managed production system: it is engineered to design new systems, refactor sprawling legacy code bases and automate software-delivery pipelines, complete with the audit trails, governance and process rigor that large organizations demand. The company is aiming squarely at regulated sectors — healthcare, aerospace, financial services, energy and the United States government — where "vibe-coded" prototypes are a non-starter and accountability matters more than novelty.

Palihapitiya taking the CEO seat is the headline within the headline. Best known for his Social Capital fund and a high-profile run of SPAC deals, he has spent most of the past decade as a financier and commentator rather than an operator. Naming himself chief executive signals that he views 8090 not as a portfolio bet but as a company he intends to build hands-on — a notable wager from someone who has more often funded founders than become one.

The raise lands in a market that remains visibly thirsty for AI software-development plays. Anthropic's Claude Code is estimated to hold roughly 40% of the agentic-coding market, Devin maker Cognition recently closed a round at a $26 billion valuation, and Cursor's owner was swept up in one of the largest startup acquisitions on record. 8090's bet is that the next phase of that boom belongs less to flashy demos and more to the unglamorous machinery of shipping audited, production-ready code inside the enterprise.