ASCII
ASCII builds computers and infrastructure for AI agents. Its main product, boat, provides affordable, persistent full Ubuntu virtual machines in the cloud so agents can run coding and knowledge-work workloads with broad machine capabilities.
At a Glance
- AI-agent developers and agent-harness builders
- Developer-tools and cloud-infrastructure companies
- Startups building agent platforms
- Software engineering teams
- +1 more
AI Tools by ASCII
(2)
boat
Cloud Ubuntu VMs for AI Agents
box by ASCII
Cloud VMs for AI Agents
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Latest News
Build an Issue-to-PR Software Factory on boat
Containers vs VMs: why your agent sandbox should be a real machine
Benchmarking Five Sandbox Providers with a Devin-Style Agent Build
Boat accepted into Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch
Products & Services
A cloud sandbox platform providing persistent Ubuntu virtual machines for AI agents, developers, and agent factories. Sandboxes include SSH/SCP, Docker, a desktop and browser, snapshots, fast disk-level forking, public HTTPS hosting, and CLI/API/SDK control.
An autonomous software-delivery/pocket-CTO product that users can address through Telegram; it delegates work to cloud coding agents, coordinates work across repositories and VMs, and produces artifacts and demos. It is built on boat.
Market Position
ASCII positions boat as a lower-cost, higher-performance alternative to agent-sandbox and cloud-development providers including E2B, Daytona, Modal, Vercel Sandbox, Railway, Cloudflare, Morph, Blaxel, Freestyle, CodeSandbox, Beam, and Runloop. Its differentiation is full persistent Ubuntu VMs rather than narrow containers, permissive machine access, built-in desktop/browser/tooling, and per-second pricing.
Leadership
Founders
Anicet Nougaret
Co-founder and CEO. He met Kirill Makarov at university in Lyon in 2022; the pair failed at their first startup before continuing to build together.
Kirill Makarov
Co-founder and CTO. He met Anicet Nougaret at university in Lyon in 2022, and the pair continued building after an unsuccessful first startup.
Executive Team
Anicet Nougaret
Founder and CEO
Co-founder of ASCII/boat; previously built with Kirill Makarov after meeting him at university in Lyon.
Kirill Makarov
Founder and CTO
Co-founder of ASCII/boat and technical lead; met Anicet Nougaret at university in Lyon and continued building agent infrastructure with him.
Founding Story
Anicet Nougaret and Kirill Makarov met at university in Lyon in 2022 and failed at their first startup together. They kept building, initially creating an agent-oriented pocket CTO and then developing the underlying full-VM sandbox infrastructure, now branded boat, for AI agents and agent factories.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Usage-based cloud infrastructure: customers pay for sandbox compute time by the second while machines are running, with a monthly minimum and optional auto-refilled time packs.
Pricing Tiers
Includes 25 compute hours.
$20 buys 2,000,000 VM-seconds (about 555 hours) of default 4 vCPU/8 GB VM time; small, default, and large sandbox sizes consume time at 0.5x, 1x, and 2x rates.
Target Markets
- AI-agent developers and agent-harness builders
- Developer-tools and cloud-infrastructure companies
- Startups building agent platforms
- Software engineering teams
- Organizations running research, legal, reporting, or auditing agents
- Long-running coding agents
- Agent factories and multi-agent software-development workflows
- Running untrusted code in isolated environments
- Development, testing, and CI-style build loops
- Knowledge work such as legal research, reporting, and auditing
- Interactive demos and hosted web applications
- Engineers from Airbnb, Datadog, Google, BlackRock, Asana, Yandex, ESA, Volvo, Mistral, Hugging Face