AI coding startup Niteshift has secured $7 million in seed funding, led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen. While that amount is relatively modest by AI industry benchmarks, the company—founded by two early Datadog engineers—has drawn backing from notable angel investors including 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 scale Datadog from its early days to a multi-billion-dollar valuation, Niteshift enters the crowded AI coding space with a provocative premise: Why would any business entrust its most sensitive assets—the code powering its products—directly to model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic, given that these companies frequently launch competing applications that can disrupt or even destroy startups? Mehmood, the CEO, draws a parallel to Datadog’s early growth, when the monitoring firm won over e-commerce clients who refused to build on Amazon Web Services. That concern was reasonable, as Amazon was simultaneously driving many of those same retailers out of business in what became known as the “retail apocalypse.”

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The AI equivalent, Mehmood argues, is already unfolding. Anthropic, OpenAI, and others are rapidly moving into vertical software markets—a trend some have dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.” “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 the broader orchestration needed to ensure AI-generated code is properly vetted and maintained—and that they’ll prefer a vendor without a competing agenda. To be clear, Niteshift isn’t replacing Claude Code or Codex, the two most popular coding agents. Instead, it claims to reduce dependence on them. Niteshift’s AI coding cloud routes between those models—along with open-source alternatives and others—based on each project’s specific needs. “Being able to switch between GPT and cloud models is important,” Mehmood said. “Everybody’s worried about getting stepped on by these giants.”

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That idea is what convinced Greylock’s Chen to invest. “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.”

What’s more, Niteshift isn’t selling tokens. Instead, 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 enters a crowded market of AI coding tools. Model independence isn’t a novel concept, and competitors have a massive head start. These include Cursor (though it may soon be acquired by SpaceX), Cognition (which just raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation), Amazon Bedrock, and AI gateway platform OpenRouter (which recently secured $113 million at a $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 challenges—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 real production environments, and they need infrastructure built by people who’ve done it at scale.