InstaLILY raises $60 million and ships Lily, an AI forward deployed engineer
The forward deployed engineer was a person you hired. InstaLILY is selling it as an agent that stays deployed and keeps deploying as the business changes.
Photo: Creative night city background with ai brain inter. // GaaS News- InstaLILY raised a $60 million Series B led by Energize Capital, with Insight Partners, Home Depot Ventures, and United Rentals participating, taking total funding to nearly $100 million.
- It launched Lily, billed as the world's first AI Forward Deployed Engineer: a long-running agent that embeds in a business, learns how it works, builds the software the work needs, and keeps running as the business changes.
- Company-cited results include $200 million in new annual sales at a national distributor and equipment diagnostic time cut from 15 minutes to under 10 seconds; treat these as company claims.
The industry keeps turning job titles into agents. InstaLILY raised a $60 million Series B and launched Lily, which it bills as the world's first "AI Forward Deployed Engineer," SiliconANGLE reported. The round, led by Energize Capital with Insight Partners increasing its stake and new strategic backers Home Depot Ventures and United Rentals, brings total funding to nearly $100 million.
An agent that stays deployed
The pitch is squarely a long-running-agent story. Lily goes into a business, learns how it works, builds the software the work needs, and gets it running in days, then, in the company's framing, "remains deployed and keeps deploying" as the business changes, rather than delivering a one-off build. "Lily turns that work into software, and it is running in days, not quarters," founder and CEO Amit Shah said in the materials. Claimed workloads include finding revenue, pricing quotes, planning routes, and diagnosing field equipment; named customers span the Home Depot family, United Rentals, Henry Schein, and PartsTown. The results InstaLILY cites are company-sourced and should be read as claims: $200 million in new annual sales generated at a national distributor, and diagnostic time cut from 15 minutes to under 10 seconds at a field-service firm.
Funding the role, not the headcount
The interesting part is what investors are buying: the forward deployed engineer as software rather than as a person. That is a direct counterpoint to the human version of the same idea, from TCS building a corps of up to 8,900 forward deployed engineers to Microsoft's 6,000-person Frontier unit. It also runs straight into the durability problem this beat keeps circling: an agent that stays deployed for months is exactly the workload cracking the orchestration stack, and exactly the kind of persistent, tool-wielding actor that the new governance layers exist to keep honest.