Three years ago, Matan Grinberg was deep in a Berkeley PhD, writing papers on string theory, when he typed the most honest search query into YouTube: "How do you start a company?”
He then cold-emailed Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire who he had cited in one of his own research papers. The next day, they were on a three-hour walk in Menlo Park.
Serendipity compounded. By the next morning, Matan had met his co-founder at a hackathon, something he describes as "intellectual love at first sight." By the day after that, they had a demo.
And Factory was born.
He's 28. This is year three. Today, Factory is one of the hottest AI startups in the Valley that builds autonomous agents that do the work that software engineers dread.
We visited their brand-new office in San Francisco that will soon house 120 people, up from 20 just six months ago. Revenue has grown more than 10x since January. They recently raised $150 million in their Series C, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.
Matan's mission
"Engineers are some of the smartest systems thinkers in the world. Yet for the last 30 years, they've had to spend time on low-leverage work. We want to change that."
Is this AI boom a bubble? Matan is unequivocal. "It is so clear to me that it is not."
