Racing ahead with Build.io and ai&

By Lex Siegel, Founder of Build.io

Neo-Tokyo in Akira / アキラ (1988), dir. Katsuhiro Otomo

We started Build.io to bring the simplicity and joy of application development to a well-supported platform for our internal projects and partner needs. From the beginning, we believed the best way to build that platform was from the ground up, starting with the most fundamental hardware components and working upward to deployed applications. That meant taking on the complexity ourselves so developers would not have to, and turning that work into a more elegant and easy way to build.

That journey took us into data centers across the U.S. West Coast, Dublin, Tokyo, and Ashburn, Virginia. When we first toured these facilities, they were shrinking their footprints as workloads moved to cloud hyperscalers. Three years later, we saw the reverse: data centers were oversubscribed, new construction was everywhere, and the focus had shifted toward the power and cooling demands of AI infrastructure.

Build.io achieved what we set out to build. Today, we have a world-class platform as a service that takes code into production in one of the best workflows teams can experience. However, just like our experience at the data center, the world around us has changed. All of the teams that use Build.io today have some level of AI integration, either in their products, in their development practices, or in their internal operations. That shift is already here, and it is accelerating.

What Build.io did not set out to build was a broad AI infrastructure footprint. That is what makes this next step with ai& so compelling. Together we can pair Build.io's application platform and developer experience with ai&'s model and infrastructure capabilities, giving customers a much more complete path from idea to production. ai& already offers access to modern models including Qwen, Kimi and GLM, and we encourage you to sign up and start using their APIs.

Build.io customers interested in these new capabilities can expect continued support as we expand architectures, integration plans and development strategies around AI and agentic workflows. Shearin Joe has played an important role in shaping how we serve and support our customers, and that perspective will continue to inform what comes next. Expect new platform features that reach deeper into these new capabilities.

One example is already available in the latest Build.io CLI: support for bld skills, which allows agents to self-discover Build.io capabilities. In practice, this enables a standard Claude Code session to discover how to deploy applications to Build.io, even without an intermediary git provider such as GitHub, and push directly to Build.io's application-launching backend. Over time, this experience will continue to mature, with richer feedback loops and a more complete agent-driven development and deployment cycle. This work has been led by Matthew Chigira, who has been building integrated experiences for this new wave of agentic application development.

We are proud of what Build.io has become, and even more excited about where it can go next. This combination gives us the opportunity to extend what we've built into a world that increasingly expects applications and AI to work side by side. We're grateful to begin that next chapter with ai& and look forward to building it together!

The Build.io + ai& Team