Datadog Alumni Launch Niteshift AI Coding Platform
Niteshift, an AI coding infrastructure platform founded by two former Datadog engineers, has closed a $7 million seed round led by Greylock's Jerry Chen. The startup aims to solve a critical problem in the AI coding space: vendor lock-in. Founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, who helped scale Datadog from its early days to a multi-billion valuation, Niteshift provides a cloud platform that allows companies to run AI coding agents across multiple model providers without being tied to a single vendor. The platform routes between different AI models—including OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude, and open-source options—based on project requirements, giving companies flexibility that direct coding agent providers don't offer. This approach resonates with Mehmood's experience at Datadog, where monitoring customers were wary of building on AWS due to competitive concerns. Niteshift's funding attracted notable investors including Reid Hoffman, Datadog co-founders Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, and Ankur Goyal of Braintrust.
Niteshift represents a smart counterplay to the AI vendor lock-in threat that many MENA startups face. For builders in the region, this could provide a critical bridge to using advanced AI coding tools while maintaining strategic independence. As Egyptian and Saudi startups scale, they'll need solutions like Niteshift to avoid the same vendor dependency issues that plagued earlier generations of cloud-native companies.
How does Niteshift differ from other AI coding platforms?
It provides model-agnostic routing, allowing companies to use multiple AI models without vendor lock-in, unlike competitors that tie users to specific models.