Datadog veterans launch Niteshift with $7M to build AI coding cloud platform against vendor lock-in

Datadog veterans launch AI coding startup Niteshift on a bet against Big AI lock-in

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. Founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, who helped grow Datadog from its early days to a multi-billion valuation, the company has entered the crowded AI coding space with a compelling idea: Why would any company trust its most sensitive assets -- code that runs its products -- directly to model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic, given that those companies are constantly "killing" startups and businesses by launching competing apps? 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." 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 SaaSocalypse. "At Datadog we saw this clearly," Mehmood said. "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). To be clear, Niteshift isn't replacing Claude Code or Codex, the two most popular coding agents. 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. "Being able to switch between GPT and cloud models is important," Mehmood said, "Everybody's worried about getting stepped on by these giants." That idea is what got Greylock's Chen to bite. "As the frontier labs move up the stack, there's an opportunity to offer customers an alternate path: unbundling their agents from the infrastructure they run on," Chen told TechCrunch. "Niteshift is building the platform that enables this for coding agents, letting customers invest deeply in their developer tooling without locking themselves into a single model or agent vendor." More than that, Niteshift isn't selling tokens. It sells infrastructure, charging like a cloud provider, with per-minute usage rates. "Everybody else is selling labor replacement intelligence," Mehmood said. "We're selling software to agents, as opposed to humans -- but we're still out here selling software." Even so, Niteshift is entering a crowded market of AI coding tools. Model independence isn't a novel idea, and Niteshift's competitors have a massive 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 $1.3 billion valuation. The list goes on. Mehmood's answer to all of that is the founding team's depth. 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. Teams, he said, need to run, test and verify software autonomously in their real production environments, and they need infrastructure built by people who've done it at scale.

Niteshift Raises $7 Million Seed Round to Power the Cloud Platform for AI Coding Agents

In a round led by Greylock, Niteshift launches general availability of its full-stack cloud platform, giving coding agents a real environment to verify their work and enabling teams to ship production-ready software at scale. NEW YORK, June 10, 2026 (Newswire.com) - Niteshift, the full-stack cloud platform for AI coding agents, today announced a $7 million Seed round led by Greylock, with participation from Amplify Partners, BoxGroup and SV Angel. The company is also backed by a number of serial entrepreneurs and technology executives, including Reid Hoffman, Olivier Pomel and Alexis Le-Quoc of Datadog, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, Misha Laskin of Reflection AI, and current and former executives at Anthropic, Google Cloud and Slack. Alongside the financing, the company is launching the general availability of its platform following an earlier waitlist period. Niteshift provides a full-stack cloud platform for AI coding agents, allowing teams to run agents such as Claude Code, Codex, and open-source models inside fully configured development environments. The platform handles the runtime, services, authentication, testing and verification workflows required for agents to build and validate software across complex application stacks.Teams can run dozens of agent sessions concurrently without local hardware constraints and trigger agents from wherever they already work, including Slack, Linear, and GitHub. Engineers, product managers, and designers can collaborate directly without maintaining a local development setup. The platform is agent-agnostic, allowing teams to switch between frontier agent vendors without rebuilding their environment. With AI coding tools advancing rapidly, many engineering teams still struggle to use them effectively across real-world software environments. While coding agents can generate code, they often lack the runtime context, dependencies and verification workflows required to confirm that software actually works before it ships. As a result, much of the process still falls back to manual setup, testing and engineering review. Niteshift addresses that gap by providing scalable cloud environments where agents can run, test and validate changes autonomously at scale. "Agents are tackling problems in hours that would have taken teams of senior engineers weeks, but the tooling needed to get that code into production hasn't kept up. At minimum, agents need a real environment to close the verification loop themselves - and that's just the starting point. Agents use tools in ways no engineer ever would, and we've barely begun building for that reality. There's an entirely new class of tools waiting to be built around what agents can actually do," said Sajid Mehmood, Co-Founder and CEO of Niteshift. "We spent years at Datadog building a powerful platform for diverse, often messy, production systems. That's exactly the experience you need to build this right" Niteshift was founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, who previously spent nearly a decade at Datadog building infrastructure and developer tooling for cloud-native software teams. After seeing the rapid adoption of coding agents firsthand, the founders started Niteshift to build the platform layer needed to support AI-native software development at scale. The Niteshift platform allows teams to launch coding agents from tools including Slack, Linear and GitHub, run multiple agents in parallel, and generate pull requests with attached verification artifacts. "Sajid and Conor have been at the forefront of developer tools their entire careers from cloud, mobile, and now AI. Their knowledge of AI combined with their obsession for shipping fast make them the right leaders to navigate this new world of agentic engineering." said Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock Partners. "We need to reimagine developer infrastructure for coding agents, and Niteshift has exactly the right team to do it." About Niteshift Niteshift is the full-stack cloud platform for AI coding agents, enabling teams to run, test and verify software autonomously in real-world development environments. Founded by former Datadog engineering leaders Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, Niteshift provides the runtime, infrastructure and verification workflows needed for agents like Claude Code, Codex and open-source models to build production-ready software at scale. Niteshift is backed by Greylock, Amplify Partners, BoxGroup and SV Angel, alongside leading technology executives and entrepreneurs. For more information visit https://niteshift.dev/