Datadog veterans launch AI coding startup Niteshift on a bet against Big AI lock-in
Niteshift, an AI coding startup founded by two early Datadog engineers, has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock partner Jerry Chen. The company runs a cloud platform that routes coding work across rival AI models such as GPT, Claude, and open source options, picking the best fit for each project. Its core pitch is freedom of choice, betting that businesses want control over their developer tools instead of being locked into a single model maker.
Key Takeaways
- AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round from a who's who of angels.
It's betting companies will want power over, not lock-in with model makers.
- The AI equivalent, as Mehmood sees it, is already underway.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and others are moving fast into vertical software markets - what some are calling the SaaSpocalypse .
- It argues that it reduces dependence on them.
Niteshift's AI coding cloud will route between those models - along with open source options and others - based on the needs of each project.
- It sells infrastructure, charging like a cloud provider, with per-minute usage rates.
"Everybody else is selling labor replacement intelligence," Mehmood said.
- Mehmood and Branagan didn't just study these problems - they lived them, scaling Datadog through the exact growing pains that large engineering organizations now face with AI-generated code.
Stats & Key Facts
- #Niteshift, an AI coding startup founded by two early Datadog engineers, has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock partner Jerry Chen.
- #AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round from a who's who of angels.
- #AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock's Jerry Chen.
- #That includes Cursor, though it could soon be gobbled up by SpaceX ; Cognition, which just raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation ; Amazon Bedrock; and AI gateway platform OpenRouter, which just raised $113 million at a $1.3 billion valuation .
AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round from a who's who of angels. It's betting companies will want power over, not lock-in with model makers. AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock's Jerry Chen.
That's a modest sum by AI standards, but the startup, founded by two former early Datadog engineers, has attracted some big-name angels like Reid Hoffman, Datadog's Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI. Mehmood, who is CEO, likens it to Datadog's early growth, when the monitoring company won e-commerce customers who refused to build on Amazon Web Services. It was a reasonable concern, given that Amazon was simultaneously putting many of those same retail stores out of business in what became known as the " retail apocalypse ."
"A big part of our multicloud business came from e-commerce businesses who did not want to run on Amazon, right? We are absolutely going to see the same dynamic as Anthropic goes to compete in legal and healthcare and finance and whatever else." The bet is that companies will increasingly seek infrastructure that separates the coding model from all the other orchestration needed to ensure AI-generated code is properly vetted and maintained (and that they'll want a vendor without a competing agenda).
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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