Factory COO: Why Big Tech Must Own Their Own AI Intelligence | Francesca LaBianca

Sophia (0:00)

Back in April, you had a $1.5 billion valuation, and now today, you announced your $5 billion valuation. This is just in five months. How did you guys grow so much?

Francesca LaBianca (0:10)

We have the benefit and fortune of working with amazing enterprises like Royal Bank of Canada, Adobe, NVIDIA, Ernst & Young, you name it, and helping them to see real, meaningful ROI with these tools. We're really moving from a world of coding agents where, you know, engineers sets up a task to software factories and self-improving software. And with that, there is a true shift in the ROI conversation.

Sophia (0:37)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to MTS. Today, I am joined by Francesca LaBianca, who is the COO at Factory. Factory is building autonomous software development systems designed to move companies beyond individual coding agents towards what it calls software factories. And today, they just announced it's raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation to scale self-improving software development in the enterprise. They are now tripling its $1.5 billion valuation from April and bringing its total funding to more than $400 million. So, Francesca, welcome to MTS.

Francesca LaBianca (1:12)

Thank you so much, Sophia. Excited to be here. It's a big day for the company, but really just the beginning of what we intend to do.

Sophia (1:18)

This is clearly just the beginning, and congratulations again on such a big day. For someone who isn't super familiar with Factory who's hearing about it for the first time, what are you guys building?

Francesca LaBianca (1:29)

Yeah, so Factory at a high level, our goal is to help organizations build self-improving software. What is self-improving software? It really is a world where builders, engineers define intent, outcomes, and then software factories execute on those outcomes. And so right now, most of this is pretty manual. Engineers are delegating tasks or have it predefined as it is. We are moving them to a world where this is fully autonomous.

And so humans are really much more of the governance layer of all of this. And we give you a system that enables you to do this at scale.

Sophia (2:01)

This is exciting. And the numbers here on your evaluation is quite telling. So back in April, you had a $1.5 billion valuation. And now today you announced your $5 billion valuation. This is just in five months. Can you tell me about what happened in this last five months? How did you guys grow so much?

Francesca LaBianca (2:18)

Yeah, great question. So I think the part that we're most proud of with this fundraise is the traction, which really underpins it. And we have the benefit and fortune of working with amazing enterprises like RelBank of Canada, Adobe, NVIDIA, Ernst & Young, you name it, and helping them to see real meaningful ROI with these tools. We're really moving from a world of coding agents where, you know, engineers sets up a task to software factories and self-improving software. And with that, there is a true shift in the ROI conversation. You know, we want to help our customers maximize the large amount of time that they're putting on these systems and tools to see measurable outcomes. And that's really what has been the success over the last six months.

Sophia (3:01)

That's really exciting. As you alluded to, you guys have some pretty huge enterprise customers that actually use Factory day to day. Can you tell me a little bit who are these enterprise customers? How are they actually using you?

Francesca LaBianca (3:13)

Yeah, so a few examples. NVIDIA, for example, they are using Factory to post train Nemotron, as well as other teams who are obviously working on chip design and many other ambitious projects.

Royal Bank of Canada is using Factory for their entire internal developer workforce and all the products that they build. Ernst & Young has pretty much standardized on Factory globally. All of their engineers building the internal platform that they use to run their entire operations. And so for us, we really see kind of three core use cases when we enter into an enterprise, which is PDLC automation, product development, life cycle automation, to migrations or modernization projects, and then three, like security scanning and automated vulnerability remediation. And so I would say these are the three kind of core areas that people are spending time on today, and then working with them to build out that suite and system to expand to their global engineering force.

Sophia (4:07)

Those are some exciting enterprise customers. I wanted to also acknowledge what you guys announced today. You said a big focus of what you plan to build is this sovereign intelligence. What exactly is sovereign intelligence? How are enterprises going to use that?