Factory Acquires Mentlio: Building Intelligent Token Allocation for the Software Factory
By Factory Team - October 9, 2026 - 2 minute read
Company
Share
Today we’re excited to announce that Mentlio (YC S26) is joining Factory to continue building the intelligent, efficient, and value-driven autonomous software engineering platform.
As enterprises deploy agents at scale across the software development lifecycle, engineering leaders and CFOs are facing the same challenge: how to understand, measure, and optimize their AI spend to create concrete value and efficiently allocate AI investment to maximize the return-on-spend. The next frontier is building software factories that spend tokens where they pay off and connect engineering adoption and effectiveness to growth, profitability, and risk.
Factory is a company where the best founders in the world can join and still be founders, building with autonomy, solving complex problems, and partnering with the world’s largest organizations at speed and scale.
When we meet teams with a shared vision, high-agency and winning mindset, we look for ways to join forces and go faster together.
After spending time with Ashank Shah and Ahmet Demirbas, it became clear we share the belief that autonomous software engineering will scale when you measure the value it creates. With Mentlio (YC S26), their team is already solving for it, building in-harness model routing and context compression to optimize cost and quality, as well as the measurement to show where AI usage creates value.
Mentlio will bring this work into Factory to help us bring efficient and intelligent autonomous software engineering to the largest enterprises in the world.
Welcome to the team and let’s build!
About the founders
Ashank and Ahmet met while studying computer science at Caltech and working part-time at startups. Together, they won 1st place at NexHacks at CMU with a token compression algorithm that later inspired Mentlio. Ashank previously researched generative AI and graph deep learning for biomedical problems at Dartmouth and Purdue and won internationally at the International Science and Engineering Fair and the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium. Ahmet previously published his research in NLP and AI in IEEE, BMC AI, and ACM, won nationally at the USA AI Olympiad and the International Science and Engineering Fair, and was named a Top 300 Science Scholar by Regeneron.
About Factory
Factory brings autonomous software engineering to the enterprise. Factory helps enterprises run a governed, model-independent system that turns business priorities and engineering signals into production software. Droids plan, build, validate, and improve work inside each company’s infrastructure, policies, and approved models. Every workstream learns from measured results, expanding engineering capacity, improving quality, and tying engineering to business results. Factory was founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes and is headquartered in San Francisco.