Boxd raises $2M to build cloud infrastructure for AI coding agents

Dutch startup Boxd has secured $2 million in pre-seed funding to build cloud infrastructure catering to AI coding agents and developers. The investment round was spearheaded by BlueYard Capital, with the participation of OVNI Capital, Antler, S20, and Script Capital, along with angel investors from General Intuition and other tech companies.

Founded by Michiel Voortman, Laurentiu Ciobanu, and Hidde Kehrer, Boxd aims to meet the escalating infrastructure requirements of AI coding agents, which demand parallel execution and dedicated, long-running computing environments. Traditional development setups often rely on single virtual machines or containers, but these methods can become cumbersome when handling multiple agents simultaneously. Moreover, allowing coding agents to run unsupervised can pose security risks.

Boxd's platform enables teams to create as many cloud machines as needed, providing snapshotting and live-forking capabilities. These features allow developers and AI agents to generate copies of running machines, including memory and active connections, within 100 milliseconds. This approach facilitates multiple agents testing various solutions concurrently while minimizing the need to configure and maintain separate development environments.

By focusing on a simplified virtualization architecture centered on CPU, RAM, storage, and networking, Boxd reduces the software attack surface and mitigates security risks associated with autonomous agents. Unlike current container alternatives, which often suffer from security vulnerabilities and lose state upon process completion, Boxd offers hardware-isolated persistent virtual machines that can be live-forked in milliseconds.

This allows developers and autonomous agents to build, test, and deploy safely, according to Hidde Kehrer, co-founder of Boxd. The company plans to use the pre-seed funding to expand its team and further develop its custom virtualization engine as it seeks to scale its infrastructure for developers and AI agents.