Chamath’s AI coding startup 8090 raises $135M, and he’s CEO

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.

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.

A workspace designed for growth, collaboration, and endless networking opportunities in the heart of tech.

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.

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.

The headline is not really the money. It is the job. Chamath Palihapitiya has spent the years since Facebook