Matan Grinberg
Matan Grinberg is the co-founder and CEO of Factory, an AI software automation company that builds task-specific AI agents to handle the full software development lifecycle, from coding and testing to migrations and refactoring. He left a PhD program in theoretical physics at UC Berkeley in 2023 at age 24 to found the company alongside CTO Eno Reyes. Factory raised a $150 million Series C in April 2026 at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, and Blackstone. Grinberg is known for his relentless leadership style and for positioning Factory as the command center for enterprise software development powered by AI agents.
“Grinberg alleges that Degnan shared confidential information with Factory's biggest competitor, Cognition”
Source→“Demand for intelligence is such that there can be multiple winners, because these platforms also 'put their models in front of more users and more workloads.'”
Source→“We proactively gave all of those customers their money back. And I remember that was one of the most difficult decisions to make because not only is there a group of 20 people who are getting ridiculous offers from all the labs... we're going to give it back because we don't think product is making their developers happy.”
Source→“A lot of companies have misallocated resources pretty poorly. There's been a lot of bloat. And I think the correction that's going to happen there is going to be really painful for a lot of people. And I think that's something that I think every AI CEO should really bear much more responsibility than they currently are for.”
Source→“"At the beginning of the year, we saw enterprises were using less than 1% of their tokens were going to open models... in May, it crossed the 10% threshold."”
Source→“At the beginning of the year, we saw enterprises were using less than 1% open models... Then in May, it crossed the 10% threshold. So it's growing pretty quickly because of the kind of cost optimization.”
Source→“Factory ($150M at $1.5B from Khosla) — AI agents automating software development tasks for enterprise teams.”
“Has Dario done a disservice to the ecosystem by saying we're going to take your jobs, we're going to take your jobs, we're going to take your jobs? Yes it actually this like really upsets me.”
Source→“In my mind the answer here is I think they're approximately equivalent... from the business perspective they're both very well suited and well positioned.”
Source→“Stripe has a really great reputation. They had incredible documentation... Five years from now it's going to be like oh my God, I cannot imagine, cannot believe that these people that get paid so much money spent hours of their time doing this.”
Source→“To me and this is speaking from strongly biased as an application person... I would want Coalesce to be bigger. Why? Because Nebius I think have more ambitious plans to be full stack which will eat into some of your plans.”
Source→“She was fucking relentless... I was like look Francesca like if you want more ownership Factory you could just join us... She was a killer.”
Source→“When we were 30 people we had like a surge like a pretty aggressive like two week sprint and as part of it I got everyone on the team Eight Sleeps like fully free whatever $3,000 per person.”
Source→“Was watching these videos, a lot of them like Y Combinator, you know, videos and all this stuff... Read Zero to One, incredible book.”
Source→“That is my sense... I think as an example, we're so used to a world where moat in software was, I know how to do this and you don't... I think this is good for Harvey.”
Source→“The future of software development is where these organizations, instead of having engineers that build the software, they're going to have engineers that build the factories that build their software.”
Source→“A million dollars. And you know what he gives me shit for? You know what the terms? Five posts.”
Source→“We want to give our customers the best pricing, the best performance, the best speed for whatever task they want to do in their software development. And we want to make sure that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft are all under pressure to make sure they give the best models for as cheap, as quick as they can.”
Source→“Phase one, this was a couple months ago, was board yells at CEO, hey Mr. CEO, what's your AI strategy? ... Phase two was AI at all costs, token maxing... Phase three is the hangover, where you go and look at the bill and it's like, oh my God, we are spending so much. I have no idea what the ROI is.”
Source→“My understanding is that building AI technology is not a core competency of that firm. So I was surprised to see it... I think as an example... it's nothing like trying to do something yourself to make you realize, oh shit this is actually really difficult.”
Source→“I ended up going to Princeton because I had a great physics professor I wanted to work with. He's this famous professor named Juan Maldacena. And I was like the first undergrad to work with him and write a paper with him.”
Source→“A million dollars. And you know what he gives me shit for? You know what the terms? Five posts.”
Source→“At factory, we're seeing things happen that we've never seen before. The size of the transactions, the speed in which they are closing these transactions, I've never seen it before.”
Source→“The killer CEOs I work with, I swear to God, Matan is reaching out to me at 10 o'clock at night, 6 o'clock in the morning.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.