- All four hosts of the All-In podcast — Palihapitiya, David Sacks, David Friedberg, and Jason Calacanis — personally backed this round through their own funds, an unusually concentrated bet from Silicon Valley’s most powerful friend group.
- 8090 has raised $135 million in a Series A round led by Salesforce, with Palihapitiya stepping into the CEO role to lead the company’s next phase of growth.
- The company says it reverse-engineered 18 million lines of 1970s-era COBOL and Assembly code behind a healthcare billing engine into 300,000 plain-English rules — in 40 days.
Chamath Palihapitiya spent the last several years as the man Wall Street nicknamed the “SPAC King” — until the SPAC boom collapsed and took several of his biggest bets, including Virgin Galactic and Clover Health, down with it. Now he is betting his comeback on something entirely different: AI agents rewriting the oldest, most broken code in corporate America.
On June 29, Palihapitiya announced that 8090, the AI-native software company he co-founded in January 2024, has closed a $135 million Series A, and that he is stepping into the chief executive role to lead the company’s next phase, his first full-time operating position since leaving Facebook.
All four All-In hosts just bet on the same company
The most striking detail in the round isn’t the size of the check — it’s who wrote it. Salesforce led the round, but the rest of the cap table reads like the credits of the All-In podcast. WndrCo is Jeffrey Katzenberg‘s fund. Craft Ventures belongs to David Sacks. The Production Board is run by David Friedberg. LAUNCH is Jason Calacanis‘ vehicle. That means all four All-In co-hosts personally backed Palihapitiya’s comeback through their respective funds — a level of concentrated, public conviction rarely seen even among close allies in venture capital.
The angel list adds further star power: Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, plus Cliff Robbins, Shyam Ravindran, Abhi Arun, and Thomas Laffont.
Why did he go looking for the hardest customers first
The company, based in Redwood City, California, builds what it calls the 8090 Software Factory — a platform that brings people and AI agents into a single collaborative environment, connecting business intent, requirements, architecture, work orders, code, testing, and production maintenance.
“AI can write code. The hard part of enterprise software is keeping fifty agents and a hundred engineers changing the same complex system every week without it pulling apart,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, cofounder and CEO of 8090. “The best companies in the world build custom software that captures what makes them unique. We built Software Factory on the belief that every organisation should be able to do the same thing.”
Rather than start with easy customers, the company deliberately went after the hardest, most regulated buyers it could find, including healthcare, insurance, life sciences, manufacturing, government, and financial services.
The COBOL claim that should make every CTO nervous
Unlike many AI coding startups that sell software and step back, 8090 also runs its own enterprise delivery business, designing, building, hosting, and maintaining custom systems for large companies directly. That work hardens the platform against the most complex legacy systems — and has produced some unusually concrete results for a startup this young, by the company’s own account.
8090 says it reverse-engineered more than 18 million lines of COBOL and Assembly behind a healthcare billing engine into over 300,000 plain-English rules in 40 days. A publicly traded health insurer turned its payable-claims rules into a deterministic pre-filter, routing more than 80% fewer claims to a pay-per-catch vendor and avoiding more than $20 million in costs over four years. A life sciences customer reduced time-to-market for a new diagnostic from 5 years to 4. A manufacturer implemented real-time validation for more than 10,000 parts, with automatic approvals reaching more than 1,000 users.
8090 says it stays accountable for these systems in production after go-live, rather than handing them off once the contract closes.
Why the timing matters
The funding comes in the middle of a frantic year for AI coding tools, with Salesforce itself among the most active backers of enterprise AI startups through its venture arm — it has also recently backed cloud security platform Upwind and German AI image startup Black Forest Labs.
Analyst estimates put the AI coding assistant market at roughly $12.8 billion in 2026, growing more than 60% year over year and on pace to reach over $30 billion by the early 2030s, according to multiple industry trackers. GitHub Copilot remains the largest tool by raw user count, while Cursor’s valuation has reportedly reached $29.3 billion after a $2.3 billion raise, and Anthropic’s Claude Code has become the fastest-growing product in the category by developer adoption, reportedly hitting $1 billion in annualised revenue within six months of launch.
What distinguishes 8090 from that crowd is who it’s selling to. Most coding assistants compete for individual developers first and enterprises second — including Replit, which has built its growth around no-code app creation for both consumers and Fortune 500 teams, and Lovable, the Swedish “vibe coding” platform now valued at $6.6 billion. Palihapitiya’s pitch inverts that, going straight at large, compliance-heavy organisations that need governance built in from day one rather than bolted on later.
From Facebook to the SPAC era, and now back to the day job
Palihapitiya joined Facebook in 2007 and helped steer its early growth before leaving to found the venture firm Social Capital in 2011, where he focused on funding healthcare, education, and clean energy.
He later became known as the “SPAC King” for taking a string of companies public through Special Purpose Acquisition Companies — several of which, including Virgin Galactic and Clover Health, lost the bulk of their value in the years that followed, drawing sustained criticism of the SPAC model itself. Since leaving Facebook, by his own account, he had been waiting for a moment significant enough to pull him back into a full-time operating role. Judging by the size of this round and who showed up to fund it, his closest allies are betting this is it.
8090 said the new capital will be used to expand the company’s commercial footprint, scale the Software Factory globally, invest in the infrastructure required to support enterprise adoption, and continue building toward a future where the ability to create, build, and innovate is accessible to more people than ever before.
