"As a fintech company handling sensitive financial data, we were concerned about how to leverage AI while maintaining strict data privacy and security standards. Factory provided us with a secure, controlled way to unify our engineering context without compromising our compliance requirements. The difference between that and having sensitive information flowing into random LLMs is night and day."
Gian Perrone, CTO, Nav

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The Problem

Nav’s mission is to help small business owners build credit and navigate complex financial decisions. Serving over 2.4 million small businesses, they needed to scale development across multiple teams and technologies—all while maintaining high code quality and security.

Despite adopting modern development tools, including AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, the team still faced significant hurdles. "Tools like Copilot help us write code faster," notes Gian Perrone, "but the real challenge wasn’t just writing code—it was everything around it: understanding context, gathering requirements, planning features, and ensuring consistency across teams."

Engineers were spending hours piecing together information before they could start coding, all while ensuring they maintained compliance with financial regulations. With multiple repositories—from a legacy Rails monolith to newer Java services—understanding the full scope of a change while keeping sensitive information secure was becoming increasingly challenging.

The problem was compounded by a fragmented toolset. Code lived in On-Premise Gitlab, documentation in Confluence, tickets in Jira, and discussions in Slack. The engineering team was constantly switching between systems, making it difficult to maintain consistency and momentum.

Nav needed a way to unify their development workflow—not just to write code faster, but to provide engineers with the full context they needed to plan, collaborate, and build efficiently.

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The Solution

An agentic AI platform that integrates seamlessly with Nav's existing tools and unifies their engineering context.

Nav’s engineering leadership was drawn to Factory’s ability to unify the entire software development lifecycle without disrupting existing workflows. "What caught our attention was Factory’s ability to dynamically pull together relevant context from across our entire engineering system," says Gian Perrone. "We needed something that could work with our existing tools while solving our fundamental context challenges."

The team was particularly impressed with Factory’s ability to:

• Retrieve relevant information across repositories, documentation, and project management systems
• Enable seamless collaboration through shared Sessions and Workflows
• Integrate effortlessly with existing tools, allowing for immediate impact

"The implementation was surprisingly smooth," notes Gian. "We went from engineers improvising ways to use AI in their workflows to having a standard solution with all of our context available in an approved way. Factory’s integrations with our existing tools meant we could start seeing value immediately without having to migrate away from any of our core systems or overhaul every single developer workflow at once."

Right away, the team was able to:

• Start any task with all relevant context gathered
• Execute complex features with full understanding of dependencies
• Collaborate seamlessly across teams and codebases
• Maintain consistent development practices across all projects

"Before Factory, understanding the full context to even begin work on a feature could take hours," explains Gian. "Now, the Factory platform automatically brings together everything we need to know—from related code to historical decisions—in one place.”

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The Impact

Factory transformed how Nav’s engineering team approaches software development, shifting the focus from gathering context to focusing on innovation and problem-solving.

"It changes how you think about building," says Gian Perrone. "Instead of endless searching across multiple codebases, engineers instinctively reach for Factory as they embark on any implementation task to help gather context automatically and come up with a well-reasoned plan."

Key Performance Gains:

• 60% reduction in context-switching time
• 2x faster feature development cycles
• 100% of engineering context automatically unified
• Accelerated onboarding for new developers

The benefits were especially evident in Nav’s complex financial integrations. "We recently launched a major update to our credit monitoring system," Gian explains. "Factory’s unified context helped us anticipate and resolve integration challenges before they became issues—something that would have been nearly impossible with our previous fragmented approach."

By unifying engineering context and automating workflows, Nav has been able to increase development speed without compromising quality. Their development processes scaled seamlessly alongside growing customer demand, improving both team productivity and satisfaction. 

"Factory hasn’t just changed our tools—it’s transformed how we build software," reflects Gian. "With unprecedented visibility into our systems, we can confidently move faster and deliver new functionality for our millions of small business customers."

Looking to accelerate your software development? Learn more about Factory. 

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