Datadog Veterans Launch Niteshift, an AI Coding Startup Positioning Itself Against Big AI Lock-in

Niteshift, founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan who were early engineers at Datadog, has secured $7 million in seed funding led by Greylock partner Jerry Chen, with backing from notable angels including Reid Hoffman and Datadog co-founders Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc. The startup enters the competitive AI coding space with a thesis centered on reducing vendor lock-in: rather than replacing popular coding agents like Claude Code or Codex, Niteshift provides infrastructure that routes between multiple models—proprietary, open-source, and others—based on project needs. The founders draw a parallel to Datadog's early growth, when e-commerce companies avoided AWS due to competitive concerns; they argue a similar dynamic is emerging as frontier AI labs move into vertical software markets. Niteshift differentiates itself by charging like a cloud provider with per-minute usage rates rather than selling AI tokens, positioning itself as infrastructure for agents rather than labor-replacement intelligence. The startup faces significant competition from well-funded rivals including Cursor, Cognition (valued at $26 billion), Amazon Bedrock, and OpenRouter ($1.3 billion valuation), though the founders argue their experience scaling engineering organizations at Datadog provides unique insight into production-grade AI code management.