Niteshift raises $7M to build model-agnostic AI coding infrastructure

Niteshift, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former Datadog engineers Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock. The funding will support the company’s development of infrastructure for AI coding agents. The seed round also drew investment from angel investors including Reid Hoffman, Datadog executives Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal, and Misha Laskin.

The founders are betting on what some are calling a “SaaSpocalypse,” a scenario where model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic are “killing” startups and businesses by launching competing applications. Mehmood, who serves as CEO, compares this dynamic to the early days of Datadog. During that period, many e-commerce businesses chose to use multiple cloud computing services—a strategy known as multicloud—because they did not want to run their operations on Amazon, which was simultaneously competing with them in retail. Mehmood expects a similar trend to emerge as Anthropic and OpenAI expand into vertical software markets like legal, healthcare, and finance. Consequently, Niteshift anticipates that companies will increasingly seek infrastructure that separates their coding models from the orchestration layer.

Rather than replacing existing tools like Claude Code or Codex, Niteshift aims to reduce dependence on a single provider for infrastructure—a challenge known as vendor lock-in. The startup’s platform routes between different AI models, including GPT and Claude, based on the specific needs of each project. To differentiate itself from competitors, Niteshift does not sell tokens. Instead, it charges for its infrastructure using per-minute usage rates, operating similarly to a traditional cloud provider. As Jerry Chen, a partner at Greylock, noted, “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. 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.”

Niteshift enters a crowded market for AI coding tools, where several rivals have secured substantial backing. Competitors include Cursor, Amazon Bedrock, and OpenRouter, which recently raised $113 million at a $1.3 billion valuation. Another competitor, Cognition, raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation. Mehmood argues that Niteshift’s advantage lies in its founders’ experience scaling Datadog through the operational challenges that large engineering teams now face when managing AI-generated code.

Why it matters

As artificial intelligence labs expand into vertical software markets, companies are prioritizing infrastructure that separates their coding agents from underlying model providers to avoid dependence on a single vendor. Niteshift is betting that businesses will favor model-agnostic platforms to protect their proprietary code and maintain operational flexibility.