Matan Grinberg

Matan Grinberg is co-founder and CEO of Factory, a San Francisco, California, company that builds autonomous coding agents it calls Droids. A theoretical physicist by training, he studied string theory at Princeton and at the University of California, Berkeley, before leaving his PhD in 2023 to start the company with Eno Reyes, now its chief technology officer.

Ten Years in Theoretical Physics

In a McKinsey interview he describes spending about ten years as a theoretical physicist, working on quantum field theory, general relativity, and string theory. During his PhD at UC Berkeley he started taking AI courses and became fixated on program synthesis, the research area now usually called code generation. “After ten years in physics, I wanted to work on something fundamental. And software is foundational to everything in AI,” he told Forward Future.

Leaving Academia to Start Factory

After about a year and a half on the problem, he decided a company was a better way to pursue it than academia. He cold-emailed a former physicist then working at Sequoia Capital, and after a long walk together that investor pushed him to make the jump. He left the PhD program soon after, and Factory started in April 2023.

Launching the Droid Command-Line Tool in 2025

Factory’s Droids take on software work such as code review, testing, refactoring, documentation, and migrations. Grinberg says the company has focused on “legacy migrations and code bases that are sometimes older than the people working on them.” In 2025 Factory released a Droid command-line tool that works with models from several labs, so teams can run the agents from a terminal without tying themselves to one model provider.

Building a Dark Factory for Software

Grinberg calls Factory’s approach agent-native software development. He has compared code editors to the Henry Ford line about customers asking for faster horses, saying editors “weren’t designed for a world where developers write 0% of their code.” On a Sequoia Capital podcast he explained that the company name came partly from Tesla’s plants, where robotic arms do the assembly, and from the idea of a dark factory where software keeps getting built with the lights off.