AI coding startup 8090 raised a $135M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures; founder Chamath Palihapitiya announces that he will lead the company as CEO
Chamath Palihapitiya, best known for his venture capital firm Social Capital and the All-In podcast, announced Monday that the AI coding startup he founded raised a sizable Series A.
TechCrunchJulie Bort
Context & Ripple Effects
8090 enters an AI coding market already attracting unusually large financings: Augment emerged with a $227 million Series B, while Cognition’s funding and valuation rose sharply across 2024 and 2025.
Salesforce Ventures has also backed AI infrastructure company Together AI, making its lead role in 8090 another investment tied to the developer-facing AI stack. Palihapitiya taking the CEO role concentrates fundraising and operating accountability with the founder.
First-order effects
8090 has new Series A capital to build and commercialize its AI coding product, with Salesforce Ventures as its lead investor.
Palihapitiya’s move into the CEO role makes him directly accountable for execution rather than solely serving as founder.
Second-order effects
8090 will be compared more directly with well-funded coding-assistant peers such as Augment and Cognition, raising pressure to show product differentiation and customer adoption commensurate with a large early round.
Salesforce Ventures gains another position in the AI developer-tooling layer, potentially strengthening its visibility into where coding workflows and underlying AI infrastructure are converging.
Third-order effects
If large rounds continue to cluster around AI coding companies, the category may become increasingly shaped by a smaller group of heavily financed vendors able to fund model access, engineering talent, and enterprise distribution.
The funding pattern suggests AI coding is evolving from a feature race into a platform and go-to-market contest, though the available coverage does not establish which products will sustain an advantage.
The trend: 8090 is part of a broader wave of capital concentrating in AI tools that aim to automate or reshape software-development workflows.
We raised a $135M Series A! 8090's Series A was 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 [vide…
Raising this round is the first in many steps of proving ourselves and building a market-altering business. So much work has yet to be done! Apply to build with us. (Link in the replies)
Here's why Chamath takes 8090 sales calls HIMSELF: Salespeople don't take what the customer says and immediately go change the product. But he can. Customer feedback doesn't get softened or lost in a CRM like it would with a salesperson. Instead, it goes straight into what 8090 […
Announcing 8090's $135M Series A, led by Salesforce Ventures. Last September, @chamath pulled me into a mission that matched mine: bring AI to the hardest, most important problems in the industries that run the real economy, and actually ship real systems. Nine months in, I
I feel incredibly fortunate to be a part of such a high-agency, smart team, and to work with so many interesting customers on challenging problems & opportunities. Some learnings from a year and a half in at 8090... 1\ There is an immense amount of technical debt in the
Congrats to the 8090 team. Putting the capital into talent plus compute/infrastructure feels exactly aligned with the kind of reliability bar these customers will expect.
On 8090's go to market: We could have sold into easier, forgiving customers and posted a nice logo wall. Instead, we did the opposite. We went straight at the hardest, most regulated buyers we could find: healthcare, insurance, life sciences, aerospace, energy, manufacturing,
Chamath: “Facebook, Tesla, Google... they almost had an allergic reaction to the traditional software stack. They refused to use it.” Find out why he raised a $135M Series A to redefine development, giving every enterprise the opportunity to build and maintain their own software …
A huge thanks to our early believers @rakeshm @revenueroll @jonathankopnick in helping build Software Factory into what it is! It's been an exciting 2 year journey leading up to this and the work's not done If you are a talented software engineer and want to work with @chamath