How Pillar made everyone a builder by moving its dev environment to the cloud

Pillar is the operating system for construction companies: cash flow, invoicing, quotations, procurement, site documentation and safety compliance in one platform, with an AI assistant on top. Over 700 construction firms run more than 2,000 projects on it, and users report saving hours of admin every week.

In May 2026 the Milan-based company closed a €12M seed round to expand across Europe, with plans to triple the team and reach thousands of active clients by 2027. The roadmap still grew faster than any hiring plan. Pillar's answer was infrastructure, not headcount.

Every construction firm that signs up brings requests: a field on the quotation, a report for the site manager, a tweak to the invoicing flow. Each one is small, and each one used to become an engineering ticket.

Pillar did not just need more engineers. It needed a way for the people closest to the product and the customers to make safe, reviewable changes themselves. The stack was in the way: a resource-hungry platform with a multi-container Supabase backend that made local setup slow and painful even for developers, and out of reach for everyone else.

The dev environment, the whole heavy stack with its multi-container backend, no longer lives on individual laptops. It runs in the cloud, on Kosuke, and every member of the team gets a live sandbox in the browser with the full platform running.

That is what makes everyone a builder. Not a lower bar, the same bar: every change lands as a pull request and an engineer merges it. The gate did not move, the number of people who can reach it did. And the layer is priced like infrastructure, by environments and sandbox hours on Pillar's own API keys, so a fast-growing company knows its ceiling before the month starts.

The platform needed more compute than a typical web app, so Kosuke added XL sandboxes. Its development environment runs on Supabase, a Docker Compose setup with half a dozen containers, while Kosuke runs each service of a stack as a process orchestrated inside the sandbox. Generalizing that model to Supabase took real engineering work.

It shipped, and today a stack like Pillar's comes up in minutes to an hour, automated end to end by agentic deploy, on any codebase. The browser-based setup also reduces the need to equip every contributor with a high-end laptop, a welcome cost benefit for a startup, even if it is not the reason Pillar made the move.

In the first months, people across product, design, operations, engineering and customer success onboarded, and the number of people building on the codebase tripled between June and August.

Then the shape of the growth changed. In August the changes submitted for review grew more than three times over in a single month while the headcount on the tool barely moved, and weekly sandbox usage rose by a third.