Datadog Veterans Niteshift Raises $7M Seed Round Led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen

Niteshift, an AI coding agent startup founded by former Datadog engineers Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen.

“Niteshift raises $7M seed round to challenge Big AI lock-in The AI coding agent startup is betting that enterprises will eventually demand the freedom to swap model providers without rebuilding from scratch”

Crypto Briefing

TechCrunch says Niteshift’s bet is that companies will increasingly want infrastructure that separates the coding model from other orchestration needed to ensure AI-generated code is properly vetted and maintained.

Crypto Briefing

The startup’s strategy is framed as a way to avoid “Big AI lock-in,” with Niteshift routing between GPT and other open-source models based on project needs.

Crypto Briefing similarly describes Niteshift as positioning itself against making it painful for customers to leave, arguing enterprises will want control over which large language models they use rather than being “welded” to a single provider’s ecosystem.

Mehmood compares the current AI coding market to Datadog’s early growth, when e-commerce businesses refused to build on Amazon Web Services because Amazon was their main competitor in retail.

In TechCrunch’s account, Mehmood argues that companies should not trust “their most sensitive assets — code that runs its products — directly to model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic,” because those companies are constantly “killing” startups by launching competing apps.

TechCrunch

TechCrunch also quotes Mehmood saying, “Being able to switch between GPT and cloud models is important,” adding, “Everybody’s worried about getting stepped on by these giants.”

The Zamin.uz report says Niteshift’s core question is why companies should entrust their source code directly to model creators like OpenAI or Anthropic, and it says the company aims to reduce dependency on tools like Claude Code or Codex rather than fully replace them.

TechCrunch places Niteshift in a crowded AI coding space and lists competitors including Cursor, Cognition, Amazon Bedrock, and OpenRouter, while noting that Niteshift is not selling tokens and instead charges like a cloud provider with per-minute usage rates.

“Niteshift, astartupfounded by formerDatadogengineers, has raised $7 million in a funding round led by Greylock”

Zamin.uz

The TechCrunch story says Niteshift’s platform routes between Claude Code and Codex along with open-source options and others based on the needs of each project, and it frames the goal as letting customers invest in developer tooling without locking themselves into a single model or agent vendor.

Jerry Chen’s rationale is quoted by TechCrunch as an “opportunity to offer customers an alternate path: unbundling their agents from the infrastructure they run on,” and he says Niteshift is building the platform that enables this for coding agents.

Crypto Briefing adds that Niteshift appears to be taking the traditional SaaS route, building a product that sits between enterprises and model providers rather than using blockchain technology, crypto tokens, or decentralized infrastructure.