Niteshift Secures $7M Seed to Combat "Big AI Lock-in

AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round. This funding comes with a bet against "Big AI lock-in." The company was founded by two former early Datadog engineers, Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan. They've attracted notable angel investors like Reid Hoffman. Niteshift's core idea is that companies won't want to trust sensitive code to model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic, who might then launch competing apps. This concern mirrors how some e-commerce companies avoided building on Amazon Web Services. Niteshift aims to provide an AI coding cloud that routes between different models, including open-source options. This approach allows companies to switch between models like GPT and Claude. The company sells infrastructure, charging per-minute usage rates, rather than selling tokens. This matters because it offers businesses a way to use AI coding tools without being tied to a single vendor.