🤗 New Investment: AppFactor - Building the Future of Self-Maintaining Software
We are excited to announce that Tensor Ventures has led a $4M seed investment in AppFactor, an agentic orchestration platform designed to automate the modernization and ongoing maintenance of enterprise software.
Founded in London by Keith Neilson, Gabriel Ciuloaica, and Attila Vajda, AppFactor is redefining how large organizations manage complex application environments — enabling software to be discovered, regenerated, and redeployed with minimal human intervention.
The round includes participation from Begin Capital, Adara Ventures, and Narwhal Investments. The funding will support platform expansion, accelerate go-to-market efforts, and help more enterprises address the growing burden of technical debt.
At its core, AppFactor is driven by a clear objective: free engineering teams from maintenance-heavy workloads so they can focus on innovation.
AppFactor: Autonomous Software Maintenance for the Enterprise Era
Enterprise software environments are becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
Large organizations often operate hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications across fragmented infrastructure. Over time, these systems accumulate vulnerabilities, outdated dependencies, inefficient architectures, and operational risk.
Maintaining them consumes a significant portion of engineering capacity, slowing modernization efforts and delaying business-critical initiatives.
AppFactor addresses this challenge with an agentic orchestration platform that functions as a coordinated system of specialized AI agents capable of operating across the full technology stack.
The platform can:
Discover where software is running
Identify code and infrastructure issues
Refactor and regenerate applications
Run system-level tests
Validate performance
Deploy updates securely
All while preserving enterprise guardrails through verification workflows and human-in-the-loop oversight.
Rather than acting as a coding assistant inside a developer’s workflow, AppFactor operates at the system level, helping organizations maintain and evolve software environments without disrupting end users.
Why AppFactor?
The industry has largely focused on tools that help developers write code faster. Yet one of the biggest constraints on enterprise progress is not code creation, it is code maintenance.
Bug fixes, dependency updates, vulnerability remediation, cloud migrations, and architectural refactoring collectively consume enormous engineering time.
AppFactor approaches this problem differently.
Its platform maintains broad contextual awareness, including application topology, repositories, dependencies, infrastructure, and runtime behavior. This enables autonomous actions to be executed with the confidence and traceability enterprises require.
Every agentic task generates human-readable success criteria tied to defined objectives, ensuring teams retain visibility into what the system is executing.
One example is vulnerability remediation: when a library exceeds a CVSS threshold or a known CVE is detected, the platform can locate the issue, propose a fix, generate tests, verify outcomes, and progressively roll changes into production.
A New Path from Legacy Systems to Modern Architectures
A particularly compelling capability is autonomous code regeneration, including migrations into modern languages such as Rust, increasingly valued for its memory safety and performance.
Historically, such migrations required extensive specialist resources and long timelines.
AppFactor reduces this barrier by automating large portions of the process while integrating documentation, testing, and deployment workflows.
For enterprises running legacy software or compute-intensive workloads, this creates a viable path toward more secure, performant, and cost-efficient systems.
Importantly, the platform fits directly into established engineering processes. Autonomous changes move through pull requests, approval gates, and code review pipelines, maintaining auditability and operational control.
What’s Their Story?
The AppFactor team brings decades of experience in advanced software engineering and enterprise systems.
Through their work, the founders repeatedly observed a pattern: highly skilled engineers spending the majority of their time maintaining existing applications rather than building new capabilities.
They saw an opportunity to rethink maintenance entirely, not as a manual process to be optimized, but as a function that could become autonomous.
This vision led to the development of a platform designed to deliver continuous modernization, allowing software systems to evolve alongside business needs.
As CEO Keith Neilson explains:
“Enterprises have brilliant engineers spending the majority of their time maintaining the past instead of inventing what’s next. AppFactor changes that by turning software upkeep into an autonomous, closed-loop process.”
How Are They Positioned?
AppFactor enters the market at a moment when enterprises face mounting pressure to modernize.
Accumulated technical debt, often described as a trillion-dollar global challenge, continues to slow AI adoption, cloud transformation, and infrastructure efficiency.
By understanding the full topology of an application environment, AppFactor enables autonomous action while honoring the safeguards mature engineering organizations depend on.
Early enterprise customers are already using the platform to compress modernization timelines and transition toward more scalable operating models.
Why We’re Invested
At Tensor Ventures, we support deep-tech companies building foundational infrastructure for the next generation of computing.
AppFactor aligns strongly with that mission.
Software complexity is increasing, distributed systems are expanding, and organizations require new approaches to remain adaptable. Autonomous maintenance represents a meaningful shift in how enterprise software will be operated in the years ahead.
We believe AppFactor has the potential to help organizations unlock engineering capacity, accelerate modernization, and build more resilient software environments.
And we are proud to support the team as they advance this vision.