Sajid Mehmood still remembers the early days at Datadog, when e-commerce companies hesitated to build on Amazon Web Services, fearing the very platform hosting their stores could one day become their biggest competitor. That same unease is now rippling through tech teams relying on AI coding tools built by OpenAI, Anthropic, and others—giants rapidly expanding into industries their customers operate in. Mehmood, now CEO of Niteshift, is betting companies won’t trust their most sensitive asset—proprietary code—to the same AI labs that might soon rival them. Alongside Conor Branagan, his co-founder and fellow Datadog alum, Mehmood has launched Niteshift with $7 million in seed funding to offer an alternative: an AI coding platform that doesn’t lock developers into a single model.
The concern is real and growing. As AI labs move up the software stack—what some call the "SaaSpocalypse"—companies in healthcare, finance, and legal tech are watching closely. If your AI coding assistant is built by a company launching its own financial compliance tool, can you really trust it not to absorb your innovations? Niteshift’s answer is to build infrastructure that decouples the AI model from the coding workflow. Instead of depending solely on GPT or Claude, Niteshift’s platform routes tasks across multiple models—including open source options—based on performance, cost, and security needs. It’s like a cloud provider for AI coding agents, giving teams control and flexibility.
The $7 million round was led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen, with backing from Reid Hoffman, Datadog’s Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI. But the real differentiator, Mehmood argues, isn’t the funding—it’s the team’s experience scaling critical infrastructure at Datadog during a period of explosive growth. They’ve lived the chaos of managing complex, autonomous software systems in production, and they’re building Niteshift for the same kind of scale.
Unlike competitors selling AI tokens or labor-replacement promises, Niteshift charges per minute of agent runtime, like a traditional cloud service. "We’re selling software to agents, as opposed to humans — but we’re still out here selling software," Mehmood says. This model lets companies invest in tooling without handing over strategic control to a single AI vendor.
The road ahead is steep. Niteshift enters a crowded field dominated by well-funded players like Cursor, Cognition (valued at $26 billion), and Amazon Bedrock. But Mehmood believes that as AI becomes embedded in core development workflows, the demand for model-agnostic, vendor-neutral infrastructure will grow. For companies wary of feeding their code into a black box that might one day compete with them, Niteshift offers a path to autonomy—one line of code at a time.