AI coding startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round to build infrastructure that lets companies switch between AI coding models rather than depending on a single provider. The round, announced in June 2026, was led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen and backed by angels including Reid Hoffman, Datadog co-founders Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI.
The company was founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, both former early engineers at Datadog who helped scale the monitoring company to a multi-billion-dollar valuation. Mehmood serves as CEO.
Niteshift’s core argument is that companies will be reluctant to route sensitive production code through AI model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic, given that those same companies are expanding into vertical software markets — a trend Mehmood describes as analogous to Amazon’s entry into retail. “Everybody’s worried about getting stepped on by these giants,” he said. Niteshift positions itself as a neutral platform that routes coding tasks between models — including Claude Code, Codex, open-source options, and others — based on project needs.
Rather than charging per token, Niteshift bills like a cloud provider, using per-minute usage rates. “We’re selling software to agents, as opposed to humans — but we’re still out here selling software,” Mehmood said.
Greylock’s Chen framed the opportunity as an unbundling play: “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 enters a competitive market that includes Cursor, Cognition — which recently raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation — Amazon Bedrock, and AI gateway platform OpenRouter, which raised $113 million at a $1.3 billion valuation. Mehmood’s stated differentiator is the founding team’s firsthand experience scaling engineering infrastructure at Datadog.
Source: TechCrunch