Boxd, a Netherlands-based company founded by Michiel Voortman, Laurentiu Ciobanu and Hidde Kehrer, is creating cloud infrastructure centred on persistent virtual machines designed for developers and AI coding agents to execute code, run tests and orchestrate software development workflows in a secure manner.
The startup has announced a $2 million pre-seed funding round to advance its cloud computing infrastructure platform. BlueYard Capital led the investment, joined by OVNI Capital, Antler, S20 and Script Capital, as well as angel investors from General Intuition and other technology firms.
Boxd is positioning itself to address the infrastructure challenges posed by AI coding agents, which frequently operate in parallel and demand persistent, long-running computing resources. Traditional development environments—whether based on individual virtual machines or containerised systems—struggle to handle the complexity of running multiple agents concurrently while maintaining adequate security controls.
The platform enables development teams to provision as many cloud machines as needed and incorporates snapshotting and live-forking features. These capabilities allow developers and AI agents to generate copies of active machines, preserving their memory and live connections, in under 100 milliseconds. This design supports parallel testing of multiple solutions by different agents while minimising the overhead of setting up and maintaining distinct development environments.
Boxd's virtualisation architecture takes a stripped-down approach, concentrating on CPU, RAM, storage and networking capabilities. By avoiding emulation of peripheral hardware such as audio devices, webcams and USB ports, the company reduces the software attack surface and lowers security risks inherent in running unsupervised autonomous agents.
Every AI coding agent needs a real computer to run on rather than a disposable sandbox. Current container alternatives suffer from security vulnerabilities and lose state as soon as processes complete. Boxd provides hardware-isolated persistent virtual machines that can be live-forked in milliseconds, enabling developers and autonomous agents to build, test, and deploy safely,
Hidde Kehrer, co-founder of Boxd
The company intends to deploy the pre-seed capital toward hiring and advancing its custom virtualisation engine as it works to expand its infrastructure offering for both developers and AI agents.
Source: Tech.eu
