Chamath Palihapitiya raises $135M for AI coding startup 8090 Labs, takes CEO role himself

Chamath Palihapitiya raises $135M Series A for his AI coding startup, takes CEO role

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. The company, 8090 Labs, closed a $135 million round led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo, David Sacks' Craft Ventures, fellow All-In hosts and "besties" David Friedberg's The Production Board and Jason Calacanis' Launch, as well angel investors like Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo. Palihapitiya founded 8090 Labs in January 2024 to offer an AI coding agent specifically for corporate programming teams. Its product, Software Factory, helps corporate coders use AI to build production-quality software, not just vibe-coded prototypes, with all the controls enterprises need, such as audit trails, the company promises. With the raise, Palihapitiya also announced on X that he will lead the startup as CEO, rather than just serving as a board member. He said the AI rush today feels like the rise of social media in his career as an early exec at Facebook, long before it became Meta. "Since I left Facebook, I was waiting for a moment like this to return to a full-time operating role," he wrote. "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's AI coding startup 8090 raises $135M

Chamath Palihapitiya has raised $135M for 8090, his AI coding startup, and is taking the CEO job himself, his first full-time operating role since Facebook. Salesforce led the Series A, which 8090 announced this week. The pitch behind it is blunt. AI can already write code. The hard part is stopping enterprise software from falling apart as dozens of agents and engineers change it every week. TechCrunch first reported the round, and the company confirmed the details. The investor list is heavy with names. Alongside Salesforce sit WNDR, Craft Ventures, The Production Board, and LAUNCH. Angels include Nikesh Arora, Cliff Robbins, Adam D'Angelo, and Thomas Laffont. The capital will go on hiring and on the compute needed to run the product at scale. What 8090 actually sells 8090 calls its product a "software factory". The idea is a single governed workspace where people and AI agents build and change enterprise software together. It tries to connect the whole chain, from business intent and requirements through architecture, code, testing, and production upkeep. The selling point is not raw speed. It is control. 8090 promises leaders visibility, accountability, and an audit trail from idea to deployment. It aims that promise straight at what makes big companies nervous about AI. The worry is not whether AI can write code. It is whether anyone can see what it changed, and why. The company also runs a delivery arm. It designs, builds, hosts, and maintains custom systems for clients in regulated industries. Those include healthcare, insurance, life sciences, manufacturing, financial services, and government. That work, 8090 says, hardens the platform against messy legacy systems. The numbers it is leaning on 8090 backs the pitch with a set of customer results. They are worth repeating, with one caveat: these are the company's own figures, not independently checked. By its account, 8090 turned more than 18 million lines of COBOL and Assembly into plain English. That code sat behind a healthcare billing engine. It became over 300,000 readable rules in 40 days. The company says a listed health insurer then cut claims sent to a pay-per-catch vendor by 80 per cent, avoiding more than $20M over four years. A life sciences customer cut a diagnostic's time to market from five years to four, it adds. A manufacturer brought more than 10,000 parts under real-time validation. If those results hold up outside the press release, they point at the real prize. It is not greenfield apps. It is the expensive, brittle systems that large firms cannot easily replace. Why Chamath in the chair matters The headline is not really the money. It is the job. Chamath Palihapitiya has spent the years since Facebook as an investor and a prolific SPAC sponsor. That period left him rich and loud. For many retail investors who bought into those deals, it was a mixed bargain, and several of his SPAC targets fell hard after listing. So a return to a full-time operating role is a statement. "Since I left Facebook, I was waiting for a moment like this to return to a full-time operating role," he wrote in a blog post announcing the raise. He framed AI as "the grand equaliser" and said the next few years would set the stage for the next twenty. That is the optimistic read. The sceptical one is simpler. Founder-investors with strong brands raise large rounds on narrative as much as traction, and 8090 is young. Salesforce putting its name at the top of the round buys credibility the founder's reputation alone would not. A crowded, expensive race 8090 is landing in the middle of a funding frenzy. Investors keep pouring money into AI coding and agent startups, even as the cost of running these tools climbs. The demand is real, and AI labs are winning paying customers fast. Enterprises already feel that squeeze. Amazon is among those hunting for cheaper alternatives. The same pressure is pushing rivals to build in-house. Meta has gone as far as restricting its engineers' use of Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex while it builds its own tool. 8090 wants to sit one layer up. It sells the orchestration and oversight, not the model. That is the same governance-first instinct now drawing money into agentic security. The open question is whether "a factory for agents" is a product or a slogan. Plenty of firms can wire a coding model into a workflow. 8090 is betting that the hard, unglamorous parts are where the durable business sits: the governance, the audit trail, the legacy systems. With Chamath now staking his own time on it, the company will not lack for attention. It will have to earn the rest.