Datadog veterans launch AI coding startup Niteshift on a bet against Big AI lock-in
Key takeaways
- AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen.
- 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.
- The AI equivalent, as Mehmood sees it, is already underway.
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.