- Sources: Fly.io blog, HN 49051369
- Summary: Founder Kurt Mackey wrote on 2026-07-24 that he is stepping down as Fly.io CEO in favor of former Docker CEO Scott Johnston and moving to an advisor role while keeping a board seat. The post states the company raised more money, without naming an amount, and that Sprites, which Fly.io describes as computers for agents rather than sandboxes, become the company's focus. Mackey says Fly Machines and the platform-as-a-service features are not going away, but frames the choice as picking one direction rather than funding both. The new Sprites iteration adds the Sprite Block Device, a rebuilt storage stack that keeps instant checkpoint and restore and adds drive forking so a template Sprite can be cloned, and Connectors, which let a Sprite make authenticated requests to other systems without holding credentials the agent could exfiltrate. Mackey attributes part of the decision to a public assessment by Theo Browne questioning whether Fly.io would still exist by the end of the year, and says the company is in a run of its strongest financial quarters.
- Why it matters: A public cloud openly reprioritizing away from human-operated full-stack deploys toward agent workloads is a concrete signal for anyone whose production apps sit on that platform.
- Follow-up: Watch for whether Fly Machines and the platform-as-a-service surface keep receiving investment, for the promised Sprites technical write-up, and for Johnston's first stated roadmap.
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