Launch AI Coding Agent Niteshift has raised a $7 million round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen. That’s a modest amount by AI standards, but the startup, founded by two former Datadog engineers, has attracted some big angels like Reid Hoffman, Datadog’s Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Braintrust’s Ankur Goyal, and Reflection AI’s Misha Laskin.
Founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, who helped grow Datadog from its early days to a multibillion valuation, the company entered the crowded AI coding space with an exciting idea: Why would any company trust its most sensitive assets—the code that runs its products—directly to model builders like OpenAI and Anthropic. applications?
Mehmood, who is CEO, likens it to Datadog’s early growth, when the tracking company won over e-commerce customers who refused to leverage Amazon Web Services. It was a reasonable concern, given that Amazon was simultaneously putting many of these same retail stores out of business in what became known as “retail disclosure.”
The AI equivalent, as Mehmood sees it, is already underway. Anthropic, OpenAI and others are moving quickly into vertical software markets – what some are calling the SaaSpocalypse.
“At Datadog we saw this clearly,” Mehmood said. “A lot of our multicloud business came from e-commerce businesses that didn’t want to run on Amazon, right? … We’re definitely going to see the same dynamic with Anthropic competing in legal and healthcare and finance and everything else.”
The bet is that companies will increasingly look for infrastructure that separates the coding model from all the other orchestration required to ensure that AI-generated code is properly audited and maintained (and that they’ll want a vendor without a competitive agenda).
To be clear, Niteshift is not a replacement for Claude Code or Codex, the two most popular coding agents. It claims to reduce dependence on them.
Niteshift’s AI coding cloud will route between these models — along with open source options and more — based on each project’s needs.
“The ability to switch between GPT and cloud models is important,” said Mehmood, “Everyone is worried about these giants stepping on them.”
This idea is what made Greylock’s Chen bite.
“As border labs move up the stack, there’s an opportunity to offer customers an alternative path: to decouple their agents from the infrastructure they’re running on,” Chen told TechCrunch. “Niteshift is building the enabling platform for coding agents, allowing customers to invest deeply in their developer tools without being locked into a single agent model or vendor.”
More than that, Niteshift doesn’t sell tokens. It sells infrastructure, charging like a cloud provider, with usage rates per minute.
“Everyone else is selling job replacement intelligence,” Mehmood said. “We’re selling software to agents, as opposed to people — but we’re still selling software.”
Even so, Niteshift is entering a crowded market of AI coding tools. Model independence is not a new concept, and Niteshift’s competitors have a huge head start. 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. The list goes on.
Mehmood’s answer to all this is the depth of the founding team. Mehmood and Branagan didn’t just study these problems—they lived them, scaling Datadog through the exact growing pains large engineering organizations now face with AI-generated code. Teams, he said, need to run, test and verify software autonomously in their real production environments, and they need infrastructure built by people who have done it at scale.
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