Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself

Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself

From Training Data by Sequoia Capital

July 21, 2026 · 52 min

About this episode

Matan Grinberg discusses the future of autonomous coding and the concept of a 'dark factory' where software builds itself.

Factory started building fully autonomous coding agents in April 2023, two years before enterprises were ready. Matan Grinberg now says this is indistinguishable from being wrong. The Factory co-founder and CEO explains how the company survived its "journey in the desert," including the decision to hand nearly all of its revenue back to customers when the product wasn't making developers obsessed. Matan makes the contrarian technical case that a model-agnostic harness beats the model-and-harness co-design that labs like OpenAI and Anthropic favor, because exposing a harness to many models keeps it from overfitting to any single one. He argues open-weight models like GLM will capture the majority of tokens by staying one generation behind the frontier at a fraction of the cost, and that CIOs will soon justify every incremental token the way they justify headcount. Looking ahead, he predicts 90% of coding tokens will run asynchronously—the "dark factory" where software builds itself. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

People in this episode

Hosts: Sonya Huang, Pat Grady

Guest: Matan Grinberg

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Factory, OpenAI, Anthropic

Products: GLM

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