7 million dollars and a team that helped scale Datadog from startup to a multi-billion valuation is going head-to-head with the belief that the same AI companies writing your code will eventually compete with your business.
Niteshift, founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan — two engineers who lived Datadog’s early growth — just closed a $7M seed round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen. The angel list reads like a who’s-who of infrastructure: Reid Hoffman, Datadog co-founders Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal from Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI.
Why Big AI Lock-In Scares Engineering Teams
Mehmood draws a direct line from Datadog’s playbook. In the early days of cloud, e-commerce companies refused to run on Amazon Web Services because Amazon was simultaneously putting those same retailers out of business. Datadog won those customers by offering multicloud infrastructure — a neutral platform.
“We are absolutely going to see the same dynamic as Anthropic goes to compete in legal and healthcare and finance and whatever else,” Mehmood told TechCrunch. He’s watching what some are calling the “SaaSocalypse” — frontier labs moving into vertical software markets. For any company shipping production code, handing the keys to a model vendor that might become a competitor is a bad bet.
Niteshift's Answer: Sell Infrastructure, Not Tokens
Niteshift isn’t trying to beat Claude Code or Codex at the model game. Instead, it offers a routing layer that sits between your team and the coding agents — switching between GPT, cloud models, and open-source options based on each project’s needs.
“Being able to switch between GPT and cloud models is important,” Mehmood said. “Everybody’s worried about getting stepped on by these giants.”
Crucially, Niteshift doesn’t sell tokens. It charges per-minute usage, like a cloud provider. “Everybody else is selling labor replacement intelligence,” Mehmood said. “We’re selling software to agents, as opposed to humans — but we’re still out here selling software.”
That distinction matters: instead of paying for output quality, you pay for the infrastructure that runs, tests, and verifies AI-generated code in real production environments.
Competing in a Crowded Field with Datadog DNA
Niteshift enters a market stuffed with well-funded competitors: Cursor (possibly headed into SpaceX), Cognition at a $26B valuation after raising $1B, Amazon Bedrock, and OpenRouter with $113M. Model independence isn’t a novel pitch.
What Mehmood and Branagan bring is the experience of scaling Datadog through the exact growing pains large engineering orgs now face with AI-generated code. They didn’t study these problems — they built the monitoring and testing infrastructure that kept code running at massive scale.
“A big part of our multicloud business came from e-commerce businesses who did not want to run on Amazon,” Mehmood recalled. “We saw this clearly.”
If Niteshift is right, the next wave of AI coding tools won’t be about the smartest model. It will be about the platform that keeps you independent when your model-maker becomes your rival.
Source: Datadog veterans launch AI coding startup Niteshift on a bet against Big AI lock-in
Domain: techcrunch.com
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