Former Datadog engineers Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan have launched Niteshift, an AI coding infrastructure startup, with a $7 million seed round led by Greylock's Jerry Chen. Notable angels include Reid Hoffman, Datadog co-founders Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, and executives from Anthropic and Google Cloud.

The core bet: as frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI move aggressively into vertical software markets, enterprises will increasingly want infrastructure that doesn't lock them into a single model vendor. Niteshift positions itself as a model-agnostic cloud layer — routing between Claude Code, Codex, open-source options, and others — while providing the full-stack runtime environments that coding agents need to actually verify their own work. Unlike competitors selling token-based AI labor, Niteshift charges per-minute usage like a cloud provider, selling infrastructure rather than intelligence.

The founders draw directly on their Datadog experience, where they saw e-commerce companies avoid AWS to sidestep a competitor. They're making the same case for AI: enterprises building on Big AI's coding tools and trusting them with their most sensitive assets may eventually find themselves competing with their own infrastructure provider, much like Amazon competed with, and eventually put out of business, many of the e-commerce retailers that built on AWS. The company claims it has already scored some interesting wins: early customers report merging over 75% of PRs via the platform within weeks of onboarding.