Niteshift raised $7M to let devs escape OpenAI lock-in
former datadog engineers raised $7m for niteshift, an ai coding infrastructure platform that routes between models to prevent vendor lock-in as frontier labs expand into vertical software.
niteshift, founded by former datadog engineers sajid mehmood and conor branagan, raised a $7m seed round led by greylock to build infrastructure that routes between various coding models. unlike competitors like cursor or cognition, niteshift charges for infrastructure rather than tokens, positioning itself as an 'unbundled' layer for coding agents. this addresses growing enterprise concerns about 'saaSpocalypse,' where frontier labs like openai and anthropic release tools that compete directly with their customers. investors, including reid hoffman and datadog founders, back the strategy based on the team's experience scaling multi-cloud monitoring. the startup faces a crowded market against well-funded rivals betting that enterprises will prioritize independence from single model vendors.