Datadog veterans launch AI coding startup Niteshift on a bet against Big AI lock-in
AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen. That’s a modest sum by AI standards, but the startup, founded by two former early Datadog engineers, has attracted some big-name angels like Reid Hoffman, Datadog’s Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI. Mehmood, who is CEO, likens it to Datadog’s early growth, when the monitoring company won e-commerce customers who refused to build on Amazon Web Services.
- ▪AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen.
- ▪That’s a modest sum by AI standards, but the startup, founded by two former early Datadog engineers, has attracted some big-name angels like Reid Hoffman, Datadog’s Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Lask
- ▪Mehmood, who is CEO, likens it to Datadog’s early growth, when the monitoring company won e-commerce customers who refused to build on Amazon Web Services.
TechCrunch — Startups files mainly under tech. We currently carry 37 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Startups | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/10/datadog-veterans-launch-ai-coding-startup-niteshift-on-a-bet-against-big-ai-lock-in/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-10T15:12:02.535Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-11T00:50:46.232Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | DXZ2VXslYqN4 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen. That’s a modest sum by AI standards, but the startup, founded by two former early Datadog engineers, has attracted some big-name angels like Reid Hoffman, Datadog’s Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI. Founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, who helped grow Datadog from its early days to a multi-billion valuation, the company has entered the crowded AI coding space with a compelling idea: Why would any company trust its most sensitive assets — code that runs its products — directly to model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic, given that those companies are constantly “killing” startups and businesses by launching competing apps?…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Startups | TechCrunch.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Startups | TechCrunch
