I'm excited to share that boxd has raised €2 million in pre-seed funding led by BlueYard Capital, with participation from Antler, OVNI, s20, Script Capital and a group of angels who have built developer infrastructure before.
Why we're building boxd
For thirty years, most software has been written the same way: on the developer's laptop, running a copy of the project on localhost. The whole toolchain — Docker Compose, .env files, "works on my machine", the shared staging environment everyone is afraid to touch — is scaffolding built around that assumption.
Coding agents break that assumption.
As models get smarter and more capable, developers are parallelizing a lot of their work: working on multiple features and bugs at the same time, trying out different implementations on multiple branches. The workflow has gotten much more complex, but the environment stayed the same: your local device.
Your local device isn't built for this. It limits your ability to parallelize work, it doesn't let you close your laptop while an agent is doing its work, and sharing your work with others is basically impossible. It's also the machine with your SSH keys and your .env on it, which is why you still watch every command the agent runs. Remote environments should be the answer, but they're still considered slow, expensive, and generally treated as scarce. We think they shouldn't be.
So we rebuilt what an environment should be. Fast to start, secure by design, shareable by default, reproducible at any given moment, branchable like a git worktree. Easy to control, by humans and by agents.
Every developer should have that, without a ticket, a platform team, or a quota in the way. Spin one up in milliseconds. Work in it, or let an agent work in it. Keep it if it's useful, throw it away if it isn't, fork it if you want to try two things at once.
That's boxd: a cloud platform for remote development where every developer gets flexible, unlimited environments, self-serve, in milliseconds.
What we built
We don't think you can get there by renting someone else's sandbox and putting a UI on it. Speed, isolation and forking all live in the layer between the kernel and the hardware, so we built everything from the ground up. Owning the whole stack, from the hypervisor up, is what lets us guarantee:
- Hardware-level isolation for every environment
- SSH access to every box, from any IDE or terminal
- Sub-10ms spin-up for a new environment
- Sub-second forks of a running VM, state and all
- Self-hostable on any KVM host: our cloud, yours, or your own bare metal
What's next
We started with development environments because localhost is the most universal bottleneck in software.
As inference gets cheaper and agents get more capable, the loop shifts from writing code to verifying it: running candidate changes, checking them against intent, keeping the ones that work. That loop is far hungrier for environments than code generation ever was. Every layer that gets built on top of it needs a fast, forkable, isolated place to execute. We intend to be that place.
This round lets us push on that foundation: faster boots and forks, a self-serve platform any developer can adopt without a platform team, and a self-hosted offering that lets companies run the whole thing on infrastructure they control.
Thank you to our customers, to the Antler team who backed us before there was a product, and to our investors who believe that the way software gets built is about to change, and that the environment is where it changes first.
If you're tired of localhost, come try boxd. If you want to build this with us, we're hiring.
