Why we raised our Series A: the future belongs to builders, and AI is how everyone gets to build

8090 raised $135M in our Series A, led by Salesforce Ventures and joined by WNDR, Craft Ventures, The Production Board, and LAUNCH. We also had the support of a group of esteemed angels including Nikesh Arora, Cliff Robbins, Adam D’Angelo, Shyam Ravindran, Abhi Arun, and Thomas Laffont. We’re grateful for their support. It validates 8090’s mission and traction so far, but mostly it accelerates the work ahead.

The capital will go to two places. The first is hiring more people, because the demand we have is accelerating. The second is investing in the compute and infrastructure needed to keep delivering our solutions at high quality and reliability.

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. We help them win by using our AI-enabled Software Factory to design and build entire new systems, refactor old ones, and find and accelerate their edge.

Companies that work with 8090 grow faster, make more money, and run more efficiently than their competitors.

Our view is that as Software Factory is used more and more to do mission-critical work inside industries with the least tolerance for error and the most oversight, it will eventually be trusted with serious work everywhere. And as we empower the biggest organizations to benefit from it, we are building a playbook and a series of network effects into Software Factory that will eventually be valuable to everyone, from SMBs to solo founders.

With much gratitude.

PS - A note on why I am doing this as CEO, rather than from the board.

I have spent my career as an allocator of different kinds of capital. Sometimes I am allocating reputational capital (ie explaining idea A vs idea B), sometimes social capital (ie influencing person or company A vs B), sometimes investing in human capital (ie convincing person A to work at company B), and sometimes simply allocating money.

Now is the moment to bring all of it together.

This is one of those rare moments when the technological ground is moving so ferociously underneath all of us that the decisions made in the next few years will set the stage for the next twenty.

AI can be the grand equalizer. It is the thing that can give everybody a shot, and I would like to help it achieve that potential. Since I left Facebook, I was waiting for a moment like this to return to a full-time operating role. I was a demanding boss back then, but I felt I had no choice given how powerful and undeniable what we were building was. 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.

Chamath