CEOInterviews.AI
Start App
Try: AI strategy tariffs earnings guidance layoffs interest rates growth

Matan Grinberg

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Factory

Search every verified Matan Grinberg interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of AI coding startup Factory, discussed the company's focus on autonomous software engineering and the evolving AI coding landscape in recent podcast appearances. He described the shift from early IDE autocomplete tools to agent-based systems, and stated that Factory is betting on a future with multiple competing AI models rather than dependence on a single provider. Grinberg also addressed model performance relative to token costs and the importance of avoiding reliance on one AI vendor. Grinberg expressed support for open-source AI models, saying he would prefer open models from China over a scenario where only closed providers exist, which he characterized as a potential monopoly. He noted that while the best open models currently come from China, he believes it is in the interest of the United States and the West to develop frontier open models. He also commented on the changing nature of software development, arguing that the traditional moat of proprietary technical knowledge has diminished, and that differentiation now lies in deciding what to build and what to decline.

Recent appearances

  • Factory CEO on who will build software in the AI era

    September 29, 2026 · 📺 Sources Podcast

    Matan Grinberg is the co-founder and CEO of Factory, a $5 billion AI coding startup building Droid agents to automate the engineering process. He tells me how AI is changing the job of a software engineer and why Factory is betting on a future with many competing models. We get into how it balances model performance with token costs and why he thinks companies should avoid depending on one AI provider. We also discuss why he thinks AGI is already here, how Factory hires its own engineers, his view of the open-versus-closed AI debate, competition with companies like Cognition, and when compani…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • Factory’s Matan Grinberg on Recursive Self-Improvement, Chinese Models & Lessons From String Theory

    September 02, 2026 · 📺 Sabrina Halper Show

    Matan Grinberg left a string theory PhD at Berkeley to start Factory, betting on fully autonomous software engineering in 2023. It started with a cold email to Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and a three-hour walk that helped convince Matan to leave his PhD and build a company. Three years later, Factory was valued at $1.5B, with recent reports putting its newest valuation north of $3.5B. We get into: what string theory teaches you about making decisions, the three phases every enterprise goes through with AI adoption, how to measure ROI per token, why he’d take Chinese open models over a closed-mod…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • Fireside Chat with Matan Grinberg, Founder & CEO of Factory | RAISE Summit 2026

    July 22, 2026 · 📺 RAISE Summit

    Matan Grinberg, Founder & CEO of Factory, joins Matt Miller, Founder & Managing Partner at Evantic Capital, on agentic software development at enterprise scale. Recorded live on the Grace Hopper Stage at the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, on July 9, 2026. RAISE Summit is Europe's leading AI gathering, bringing together 9,000+ founders, executives, investors, researchers and policymakers. Learn more: https://www.raisesummit.com Subscribe for every session from RAISE Summit 2026.

    Watch on YouTube ↗

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

    July 21, 2026 · 📺 Sequoia Capital

    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 keep…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • AMD, Starcloud, Coatue..10 Hot Takes From The Biggest Names in AI

    July 18, 2026 · 📺 Sourcery with Molly O'Shea

    Day 1 of RAISE Summit in Paris, the most high-profile AI summit in Europe. We pulled 10 of the sharpest founders, operators, and investors aside for their hottest takes on the debates defining AI right now. Open source vs closed models dominated the room, alongside agents rewriting how work gets done, the death of the keyboard and mouse, the economics of inference, and physical AI moving from data centers into cars, devices, and even orbit. Real numbers, real disagreements, and a few pieces of breaking news, straight from the people building it. "The keyboard and mouse are slowly dying." - M…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • From String Theory to $1.5B: The Factory Story | Ft. Matan Grinberg

    July 07, 2026 · 📺 Startup Policy Forum

    Matan Greenberg was a theoretical physics PhD student at Berkeley studying string theory when he decided to look up "how to start a company" on YouTube. What followed was a cold email to a Sequoia partner, a three-hour walk in Menlo Park, a hackathon the very next day, and the birth of Factory AI. Three years later, Factory is one of the hottest AI startups in Silicon Valley. They've gone from 20 to 120 people in under six months, grown revenue more than 10x this year, and just raised a $150 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation. In this conversation with Startup Policy Forum's Shweta…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • His AI Coding Tool Beats Anthropic's Own Claude Code

    June 30, 2026 · 📺 The Generalist

    Matan Grinberg is the co-founder and CEO of Factory, an AI company valued at $1.5 billion that helps enterprises like Nvidia, Morgan Stanley, and Adobe automate software development through “Droids,” intelligent agents designed to streamline software engineering. Before Factory, Matan spent more than a decade in theoretical physics, studying string theory at Princeton and UC Berkeley. His work now centers on a different kind of complex system: how software gets built in an era of increasingly capable AI agents, open models, and shifting compute economics. In our conversation, we explore: • Ho…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Open-Source | Token Maxing, AI Hangovers & The Coming ROI Reckoning

    June 13, 2026 · 📺 20VC with Harry Stebbings

    Matan Grinberg is the Founder and CEO @ Factory, an AI research lab, bringing autonomy to software engineering. Matan has raised over $220M for the company from the likes of Sequoia, Khosla, NEA, Evantic and 20VC. Last round valued the company at a whopping $1.5BN. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:22 Will AI actually increase GDP? 2:41 Smaller teams or bigger ambitions? 5:05 The resource allocation problem: tokens, dollars, people 6:49 Kirkland's $500M AI bet and the build vs buy question 10:01 Models, app…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • Cursor's $60B Deal, DeepSeek V4 & the Death of the AI Moat | This Week in AI E11

    April 30, 2026 · 📺 This Week in AI and This Week in Startups

    02:26 Meet the guests: Matan Grinberg, Russ d'Sa, George Sivulka 03:30 Factory's mission: bringing autonomy to software ...

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • This Physicist Is Building AI Droids | First Time Founders with Ed Elson

    November 02, 2025 · 📺 Prof G Markets

    Today in First Time Founders, Ed Elson speaks with Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of Factory, an agentic AI company focused on bringing autonomy to software engineering. They discuss the long-term future of AI, the role of regulation, and whether or not he’s concerned about an AI bubble. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:07 - Interview with Matan Grinberg 01:14 - How did you go from physics to AI? 07:27 - What makes Factory different? 10:13 - How is factory making processes easier for others? 13:40 - Why is making AI work for us a better than working alongside it? 16:24 - Do you agree that AI…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • How to Rebuild Every Workflow with AI (The Playbook) ft. Matan Grinberg

    October 14, 2025 · 📺 The Next Wave - AI and the Future of Technology

    Episode 80: Are coders really being replaced by AI agents, or is this just the next tech hype cycle? Want to implement AI agents like $50M startups do? Get our ultimate guide: 🔗 https://clickhubspot.com/3054dc Nathan Lands (https://x.com/NathanLands) is joined by repeat guest Matan Grinberg (https://x.com/matansf), co-founder of Factory—an agent-native software development platform backed by NEA, Sequoia, JP Morgan, and Nvidia. This episode dives deep into Factory’s ambitious mission to transform software engineering by enabling developers—and entire organizations—to delegate painful, repeti…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • How Factory Builds Agents That Help Across The Entire SDLC with Matan Grinberg, Founder & CEO

    September 09, 2025 · 📺 Barrchives Podcast

    Factory co-founder and CEO Matan Grinberg joins Barr Yaron to talk about the future of agent-driven development, why enterprise migrations are the perfect wedge for AI adoption, and how software engineering is moving toward a world where humans orchestrate instead of implement. They dive into Factory’s origin story, the challenges of building AI systems for large organizations, and what the world might look like when millions of “droids” (AI agents) collaborate on software. Along the way, Matan shares surprising use cases, lessons from working with enterprises, and how his personal journey—fr…

    Watch on YouTube ↗

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →