Niteshift, an AI coding infrastructure startup founded by former early Datadog engineers Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock partner Jerry Chen. Notable angels include Reid Hoffman, Datadog co-founders Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI.
The company’s core argument is that enterprises will increasingly resist routing their most sensitive codebases through AI model makers like Anthropic and OpenAI, given that those companies are aggressively expanding into vertical software markets and effectively competing with their own customers. Mehmood, who serves as CEO, draws a direct parallel to Datadog’s early growth, when e-commerce companies opted out of Amazon Web Services precisely because Amazon was simultaneously displacing their businesses.
Rather than replacing popular coding agents such as Claude Code or Codex, Niteshift positions itself as a model-agnostic routing layer that orchestrates between frontier models, open-source alternatives, and others based on project requirements. Unlike competitors selling token-based usage, Niteshift charges per-minute infrastructure fees, positioning itself as a cloud provider for AI coding agents rather than a labour-replacement tool.
Chen said the opportunity lies in unbundling coding agents from the infrastructure they run on, allowing enterprises to invest in developer tooling without locking into a single model vendor. Niteshift enters a crowded field that includes Cursor, Cognition, Amazon Bedrock, and OpenRouter, but the founders argue their advantage lies in having scaled engineering infrastructure at Datadog through the exact challenges large organisations now face with AI-generated code.
