Dutch startup Boxd raises $2M for AI coding agent infrastructure
What's the deal? Dutch startup boxdDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has raised $2 million in a pre-seed round to build cloud infrastructure for developers and AI coding agents. BlueYard CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led, with OVNI CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, AntlerDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, S20, Script CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and angels from General Intuition participating.
What's the endgame? Boxd — founded by Michiel Voortman, Laurentiu Ciobanu, and Hidde Kehrer — provides persistent virtual machines where developers and AI agents can run code, execute tests, and manage software workflows. It targets the computing demands of coding agents, which run in parallel and need dedicated, long-running environments.
Why now? Traditional setups rely on individual virtual machines or containers. Boxd argues these grow hard to manage as developers run multiple agents at once, and letting agents operate unsupervised adds security risks.
What's the product? The platform lets teams spin up as many cloud machines as needed, with snapshotting and live-forking that copy a running machine — memory and active connections included — in under 100 milliseconds. That lets multiple agents test different solutions in parallel.
Boxd uses a stripped-down virtualisation architecture focused on CPU, RAM, storage, and networking, rather than emulating hardware such as audio devices, webcams, and USB ports. It says this shrinks the software attack surface and mitigates risks from autonomous agents.
What could go wrong? "Current container alternatives suffer from security vulnerabilities and lose state as soon as processes complete," said co-founder Hidde Kehrer. Boxd's pitch rests on solving both — a claim it must now prove at scale.
The company will use the funding to expand its team and develop its custom virtualisation engine.
The signal: As AI coding agents proliferate, the infrastructure they run on is becoming its own contested layer. Boxd is betting that hardware-isolated, persistent machines — not disposable sandboxes — will define how autonomous agents build and ship software.
Read more: Tech.eu
Image credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg
