Enterprise coding agent startup Factory announced it has raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation, more than tripling its valuation from its last funding round five months ago. Founded in 2023, Factory develops AI agents for software engineering teams. Its platform is designed for work across the full software development lifecycle, including building, testing and maintaining applications. The company says its customers include Nvidia, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, T-Mobile, and Blackstone. As AI coding startups proliferate, Factory is trying to differentiate itself by taking agents beyond discrete coding tasks and into coordinated software development workflows. In June, the company introduced Factory 2.0, which it describes as a “software factory” that brings tasks such as code review, security analysis, documentation, quality assurance and incident response onto a common agent platform. The platform also supports cloud, self-hosted and fully air-gapped deployments, which could ...
LocalStack this week revealed it has acquired WonderTwin AI , a provider of an emulator of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that is used to build custom applications for those platforms. Colin Neagle, vice president of marketing for LocalStack, said the emulators WonderTwin AI has developed will be integrated into the company’s namesake emulation platform that application development teams currently rely on to emulate cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). LocalStack and WonderTwin AI make it possible for application developers working on a local machine to build applications that are designed to be deployed on some type of external cloud platform using a local sandbox to test and validate integrations without having to connect to a service or build against a live application programming interface (API). That issue has been especially critical in an era where more code will soon be generated by AI coding agents that may for one reason or another circumvent the...