Factory, the creators of enterprise-ready AI coding agents, today announced that Madison Faulkner has joined the company as Head of Strategy. Faulkner, a Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), has worked closely with Factory since joining the Company’s board in conjunction with NEA leading its $50 million Series B. Her move from investor to operator reflects the depth of conviction she developed working alongside the Factory team – and the opportunity she sees ahead. Partner and Head of AI Strategy at NEA, Lila Tretikov, who has worked closely with Factory since NEA’s initial investment, will assume the board seat.
Both Faulkner and Tretikov bring extraordinary technical depth, coming into investing roles at NEA after careers building and leading AI systems at scale. Factory itself was founded by engineers. The appointments reflect a broader shift in how the best AI companies and firms are being built: with technical depth on both sides of the table.
“The best thing about Madison and Lila is that neither of them needs the problem explained,” said Matan Grinberg, co-founder and CEO of Factory. “They've both built AI systems, led engineering teams, and watched enterprises struggle with the same infrastructure problems we're solving. Madison believed in what we were building so deeply that joining the team full-time was the only logical next step. And having Lila step into that board seat means we're gaining someone who has operated at a scale companies like ours aspire to.”
Faulkner brings deep applied machine learning expertise, having worked as an engineer at Meta and Head of Data Science and AI at Thrasio. Tretikov brings executive leadership forged at Microsoft, where she served as Corporate Vice President and Deputy CTO and as CEO of Wikimedia Foundation. Faulkner and Tretikov have built conviction around the agentic developer stack earlier than most of the market — and Factory was where that thesis came into sharpest focus. Now Factory has both of them in its corner — one building from the inside, one guiding from the board — backed by the full support of NEA.
“For more than two years together at NEA, Lila and I were deeply focused on where AI infrastructure was going and where the gaps were,” said Faulkner. “Factory was the clearest answer I found to a problem I've seen since my engineering days: developers buried in maintenance work they didn't create and couldn’t escape. That conviction compelled me to join Factory – backing them was never going to be enough, I wanted to help build it and be a part of its magic. I couldn't be more excited that Lila is joining the board. She was part of building this thesis from the beginning, and Factory is getting one of the sharpest minds in enterprise AI at exactly the right moment.”
Tretikov's path to the Factory board runs through some of the most consequential technology institutions of the past two decades. She studied computer science and AI at UC Berkeley, led Wikipedia as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, and joined Microsoft in 2018 as Corporate Vice President and Deputy Chief Technology Officer, driving AI transformation across the company until 2024. Forbes has named her one of the world's 100 most powerful women.
“Madison and I have been thinking about this space together at NEA for two years, so in some ways this feels like a continuation of the same conversation,” said Tretikov. “She's going to go build the thing we kept talking about, and I get to be part of that journey as a board member. What Factory has built – agents that work across the real complexity of enterprise engineering – is exactly what the industry needs. At NEA, we talk about conviction, and Madison joining Factory is the clearest expression of that. She's staying in the NEA family, and we couldn't be more proud to continue backing this company and this team.”
Founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes, Factory's AI agents, called Droids, handle complete tasks across the software development lifecycle – migrations, refactors, automated testing, code review, documentation, and incident response – inside the tools engineers already use. Customers include Morgan Stanley, Revolut, RBC, EY, Palo Alto Networks, and Adyen. The company closed a $150 million Series C led by Khosla Ventures with continued participation from NEA in April 2026 at a $1.5 billion valuation and has doubled revenue month over month for the past six months.
About Factory
Factory builds AI agents, called Droids, for enterprise engineering teams. Droids handle complete tasks across the software development lifecycle – migrations, refactors, testing, code review, documentation, and incident response – inside the tools developers already use. The platform works across models and interfaces. Factory was founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes and is headquartered in San Francisco. Investors include Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, NEA, Nvidia, J.P. Morgan, Insight Partners, and Blackstone. For more information, visit factory.ai.
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