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

Niteshift, an AI coding agent startup, has raised $7 million in seed funding, led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen. Founded by former Datadog engineers Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, the company challenges the reliance on large AI model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. The founders draw a parallel to Datadog’s early success, where customers avoided building on Amazon Web Services due to competitive concerns, a dynamic now emerging in the AI space. Niteshift’s core idea is to provide an infrastructure that separates the coding model from the orchestration needed to vet and maintain AI-generated code. This approach allows companies to switch between various models, including open-source options, and avoid vendor lock-in. The company emphasizes that it sells infrastructure and software to agents, not labor replacement intelligence, charging per-minute usage rates like a cloud provider. Despite entering a crowded market with well-established competitors such as Cursor, Cognition, and Amazon Bedrock, Niteshift highlights the founding team’s deep experience. Mehmood and Branagan scaled Datadog through challenges similar to those large engineering organizations now face with AI-generated code, giving them unique insight into the need for robust, independent infrastructure.