Boxd raises $2M to give AI coding agents real machines
Dutch startup Boxd closed a $2 million pre-seed round to build cloud infrastructure purpose-built for developers and AI coding agents running in parallel. BlueYard Capital led the round, with OVNI Capital, Antler, S20, and Script Capital joining alongside angels from General Intuition and other technology companies.
The Problem It Solves
Traditional VMs and containers work fine for one developer running one process. They get messy when multiple AI agents spin up simultaneously, each needing its own persistent environment. Running agents without supervision on shared infrastructure also introduces security exposure that most teams are not set up to handle.
How Boxd Works
The platform lets teams spin up as many cloud machines as needed. The standout capability is live-forking: developers or agents can create exact copies of a running machine, including memory state and active connections, in under 100 milliseconds. That means multiple agents can branch off to test different solutions in parallel without reconfiguring separate environments from scratch.
Boxd also trims the virtualisation stack to CPU, RAM, storage, and networking only. No audio devices, no webcams, no USB emulation. The narrower attack surface is intentional: fewer emulated hardware components means fewer vectors for a rogue agent to exploit.
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.
Co-founder Hidde Kehrer made that case directly. The pre-seed will go toward team expansion and continued development of Boxd’s custom virtualisation engine. The company was founded by Michiel Voortman, Laurentiu Ciobanu, and Kehrer.
The Operator Takeaway
If you are running multi-agent coding workflows today, the infrastructure layer is the unsolved piece. Boxd is betting that persistent, forkable VMs are the right primitive for that layer. Worth watching as agent-based development moves from experiment to standard practice.
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