Poolside is a San Francisco AI lab building foundation models purpose-built for software engineering. Founded in 2023 by former GitHub CTO Jason Warner and serial entrepreneur Eiso Kant, it trains its frontier models (malibu, point) with a technique called Reinforcement Learning from Code Execution Feedback - then deploys the whole stack inside customer environments for Global 2000 enterprises, financial institutions and the public sector.
Cursor is an AI-first code editor built by Anysphere, a San Francisco startup founded in 2022 by four MIT graduates. Originally a fork of Visual Studio Code, Cursor has evolved into a full agent-based development platform where autonomous AI handles everything from autocomplete to end-to-end feature building. With $2B+ in annualised revenue, over half the Fortune 500 as customers, and a valuation that reached $29.3B after its Series D in November 2025, Cursor has become the fastest-growing SaaS company ever from $1M to $500M ARR - turning the IDE from a code-writing tool into an AI orchestration layer.
Factory builds agent-native software development for enterprises. Its Droids - specialized AI agents for coding, reliability, product, and knowledge work - take tickets, write code, open PRs, and triage incidents alongside human engineers. Founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes, the San Francisco company raised a $150M Series C in April 2026 at a $1.5B valuation led by Khosla Ventures.
Matan Grinberg is the CEO and Co-Founder of Factory, an AI platform that deploys autonomous agents called Droids to automate the entire software development lifecycle. A theoretical physicist who dropped out of his UC Berkeley PhD program in 2023 after a fateful three-hour walk with Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, Grinberg built Factory from a 72-hour hackathon demo into a $1.5B unicorn backed by Khosla Ventures, Sequoia, Blackstone, and Insight Partners. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 AI in 2025, he is one of the defining voices in the agent-native development movement.
Peter Morales is the CEO and co-founder of Code Metal, a Boston-based AI company that hit unicorn status in February 2026 after raising a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures. With a background spanning BAE Systems (F-35 ML optimization), MIT Lincoln Laboratory (counter-drone AI), and Microsoft (HoloLens computer vision), Morales built Code Metal to solve a gap he discovered firsthand: AI can generate code fast, but mission-critical industries — defense, automotive, semiconductors — need proof that code is correct before it ships. Code Metal's verifiable AI platform translates high-level code into hardware-optimized, mathematically verified production code for edge devices, drones, FPGAs, and autonomous systems. Customers include the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, Raytheon, Toshiba, and Bosch.
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the AI company behind Devin - widely recognized as the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. A three-time International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Wu started coding at age 9, interned at a fintech startup as a high schooler alongside future Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, briefly attended Harvard, then spent five years building Lunchclub as CTO before co-founding Cognition in 2023 with fellow competitive programming champions. Under his leadership, Cognition grew from a 10-person apartment startup to a $10.2 billion company with over 200 employees, acquired Windsurf in July 2025, and raised $675 million in total funding - with Devin's annualized revenue surging from $1 million to $73 million in under a year.