Why we invested in AppFactor: Enabling a new age of Self-healing software

We are pleased to announce our investment in AppFactor, a platform designed to eliminate and prevent technical debt across large-scale enterprise software systems. 

Adara Ventures co-led the $4m Seed round, alongside Tensor Ventures and Begin Capital, with participation from Narwhal.

The challenge: Technical debt is consuming enterprise innovation

Software is the foundation of every modern enterprise, yet its progress is increasingly constrained by technical debt. Industry estimates place the technical debt burden in the US alone at over $1.5 trillion, with more than 50% of IT budgets spent simply maintaining existing systems. Engineers often spend a third of their time on maintenance tasks rather than innovation. This dynamic leaves organisations struggling to modernise while their application estates continue to age.

As enterprises move toward cloud-native architectures, containers, and emerging runtimes, decades of prior investment in legacy systems are becoming increasingly difficult to evolve. Frameworks and dependencies reach end-of-life faster than ever, security vulnerabilities accumulate, and documentation becomes outdated. Traditional, project-based modernisation approaches are slow, risky, and prohibitively expensive. What’s more, they simply cannot scale to hundreds or thousands of applications.

Introducing AppFactor: An AI “autopilot” for software maintenance

AppFactor addresses this challenge with a fundamentally new approach. Its AI-augmented developer platform uses automation and generative AI to analyse, modernise, and continuously maintain enterprise software at a system level – across code, architecture, infrastructure, and dependencies.

Rather than treating modernisation as a one-off project, AppFactor places this software maintenance on autopilot. The platform connects directly to an organisation’s repositories and environments, mapping entire application estates in minutes and revealing how components interact across hundreds of servers. This system-level understanding allows AppFactor to reduce accumulated technical debt and prevent it from rebuilding over time.

At the core of the platform is an agentic AI engine operating across four coordinated pillars:

• Automated generation of up-to-date code documentation
• System-level analysis and scoring of technical debt and optimisation opportunities
• Comprehensive test generation, from unit to end-to-end
• Assisted refactoring and transformation to modern architectures and runtimes

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Together, these capabilities allow enterprises to modernise applications safely, continuously, and at scale, while maintaining full control over deployment environments.

A founding team with deep modernization DNA

AppFactor was founded by Keith Neilson (CEO), Gabriel Ciuloaica (CTO), and Attila Vajda (VP of Engineering), a team with decades of experience building and scaling technology acceleration and modernization platforms. 

Keith previously built and sold a modernization product to AWS; Gabriel is a major contributor to the Scala and Rust ecosystems; and Attila has co-authored virtualization patents and led engineering teams behind widely adopted developer tools.

This blend of deep technical expertise and firsthand experience with enterprise transformation programmes gives the team a unique understanding of why traditional approaches fail and what it takes to modernise software sustainably.

The Adara view: AI-driven maintenance as critical enterprise infrastructure

At Adara, we believe the future of enterprise software depends on systemic solutions to technical debt. As software stacks grow more complex and the pace of technological change accelerates, enterprises need platforms that can continuously adapt their systems without introducing new risk or cost.

With early enterprise traction, a compelling technical approach, and a team deeply rooted in modernisation at scale, we believe AppFactor is well-positioned to become a category-defining platform for managing technical debt in the AI era.

We’re excited to partner with the AppFactor team as they scale their platform and help enterprises reclaim innovation capacity from the burden of technical debt.

Learn more about AppFactor: https://www.appfactor.io