boxd

boxd provides composable, persistent Linux virtual machines designed for developers and AI agents. Each machine is a real KVM virtual machine running Ubuntu 24.04 with its own kernel, a public IPv4 address, and an automatic HTTPS domain — not a container or shared-kernel sandbox. The company raised €2M and positions the product as a replacement for localhost development.

What It Is

boxd is a cloud platform that gives every developer, agent, or pull request its own full Linux computer. Machines boot in under 10ms, persist their state across sessions (running processes, open files, shell state), and cost nothing while hibernated. The core primitive is a persistent, forkable KVM VM that can be created, forked, snapshotted, checkpointed, paused, resumed, and hibernated through a CLI, API, or SDK.

How the Machine Model Works

Unlike containers or CI runners, boxd machines are real KVM virtual machines with their own Linux kernel. Key behaviors:

• Persistence by default: closing the terminal does not stop the machine; builds, background jobs, and agent tasks continue running.
• Hibernation: machines automatically suspend to disk when network activity stops and resume in sub-millisecond on the next connection.
• Forking: a live memory fork copies the entire running machine — kernel, filesystem, processes, disk — in under 200ms. The fork is a real machine, not a layer on top.
• Snapshots and checkpoints: freeze a machine and restore it later, or roll back in place to a save point without creating a new machine.
• Default shape: 2 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM, 100 GiB disk per machine; up to 50 machines per organization by default.

Use Cases and Audiences

boxd targets three overlapping audiences: individual developers who want a persistent cloud dev box, engineering teams who want per-PR preview environments with real services and databases, and AI agent builders who need isolated, stateful machines for coding agents, personal assistants, sandboxes, and agent swarms. The platform ships preinstalled with Claude Code, Codex, Docker, Python 3, Go, git, headless Chrome, ffmpeg, and other common tools.

Specific use cases documented on the site include:

• Development workspaces (persistent editor, dotfiles, running processes)
• Preview environments (full stack per pull request)
• Coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, each with their own machine)
• Sandboxes for untrusted agent-generated code
• Agentic SaaS (machines created and destroyed via SDK per end user)
• Reproducible RL environments (fork from one prepared machine per rollout)
• Agent swarm intelligence (fan out to many parallel machines)

Architecture and Self-Hosting

The platform is built as nine Rust crates compiled into a single binary: control plane, worker, proxy, DNS, Raft consensus, CLI, per-VM VMM, in-VM agent, and a single-node combined binary. RocksDB holds the Raft log; embedded SQLite holds materialized state. There are no external dependencies — no Kubernetes, no Postgres, no Redis, no queue.

Self-hosting is a first-class deployment model: drop the binary on any KVM-capable Linux host. The open-source microVM engine underneath is called Ignition and lives at github.com/lttle-cloud/ignition. Self-hosted installs support EU data residency, SSO + audit logs, and BYOC (bring your own cloud).

Integrations and Agent Interface

boxd connects to GitHub, Linear, Slack, Tailscale, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor. An MCP server installs directly into Claude Code, Codex, or opencode. Every VM ships with an in-VM boxd CLI that auto-authenticates by source IP, so agents can create, fork, exec on siblings, or open a proxy using only shell commands — no SDK injection required. Environment variables and secrets are scoped to the organization and available in every machine.

Billing Model

Billing is credit-based and meters actual usage rather than provisioned capacity. RAM bills on memory actually resident (sampled every second), disk bills on bytes written (not provisioned size), and vCPU bills only while the machine is running. A hibernated machine pays only for disk written. New accounts receive $30 of free credits on adding a payment method. A custom tier covers bigger machines, volume pricing, self-hosting, EU data residency, SSO, audit logs, and dedicated support.