Finland's Tangled Raises €3.8M for GitHub Alternative

Finland's Tangled Raises €3.8 Million to Build a European Open-Source Alternative to GitHub, Backed by Former GitHub CEO

In one of the most compelling pieces of AI funding news to emerge from the European startup ecosystem this year, Finland-based code collaboration platform Tangled has officially announced a €3.8 million (approximately $4.5 million) seed funding round to scale its decentralised, open-source platform into a globally competitive alternative to GitHub. The round was led by byFounders, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and existing backer Antler. Joining alongside institutional investors is a powerful roster of angel backers, most notably Thomas Dohmke, former Chief Executive Officer of GitHub, alongside Avery Pennarun, CEO of Tailscale, Mårten Mickos, former CEO of both MySQL and HackerOne, and Finnish investor Sami Honkonen. The announcement signals not just a significant moment in AI funding for European developer infrastructure, but also a broader ideological shift in how the global developer community thinks about code sovereignty, digital ownership, and open-network collaboration in the age of AI.

The Vision: Reclaiming Developer Sovereignty in a Microsoft-Dominated World

To understand why Tangled matters, it helps to step back and look at the landscape of modern software development. When Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, it fundamentally altered the trajectory of what had been an organic, developer-led platform. Over time, independent developers and open-source communities — the very groups who had built GitHub's credibility and cultural cachet — gradually found themselves deprioritised. Product development began to tilt toward enterprise needs, and the introduction of AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot brought a new kind of ideological friction into the community. Many developers began to question whether a platform owned by one of the world's largest corporations was truly the right custodian for their code, their identity, and their professional legacy.

Anirudh Oppiliappan, co-founder of Tangled, has spoken openly about this tension. He has described GitHub as "an aging platform that hasn't really meaningfully improved in time," and argued that the open-source communities and independent developers who gave GitHub its early momentum have since become its most underserved user group. For Tangled, this is not merely a business opportunity — it is a foundational mission. The company wants to give the developer community a genuine alternative: one that prioritises transparency, developer sovereignty, and open-network architecture over corporate control and centralised data management. This mission is particularly resonant in Europe, where conversations around digital sovereignty, data privacy, and regulatory independence from American tech giants have intensified significantly over the past few years. In that context, Tangled's positioning as a platform built in Europe, but designed for the world, carries both technical and political weight that resonates deeply with modern developers.

Meet the Founders: Brothers Building the Future of Code Collaboration

Tangled was founded by brothers Akshay and Anirudh Oppiliappan, both of Indian origin but deeply embedded in the European tech ecosystem. Anirudh is based in Helsinki, where he relocated after joining Finnish cloud provider UpCloud, while Akshay operates from London, where he previously worked at code search engine Bloop. The geographic spread of the founding team — one in Finland, one in the United Kingdom — is not incidental. It reflects the company's cross-European identity and its belief that developer infrastructure built within European jurisdiction can offer something fundamentally different from what Silicon Valley incumbents have created.

Both brothers bring substantial technical depth to the venture. They have previously worked at Y Combinator-backed startups and have hands-on experience building large-scale distributed systems and code intelligence platforms. This background is critical, because what Tangled is building is not simply a GitHub clone with better UI — it is a next-generation code forge designed from first principles to handle the complexity of modern software development, including the growing role of autonomous AI agents in writing, reviewing, and managing code. Their shared passion for open infrastructure, transparent systems, and developer-first design philosophy underpins every architectural decision they have made. And while the company is small — currently comprising the two founders, an engineer recruited from South Korea through their Discord community, and one other collaborator — the fresh capital will allow them to bring on three additional generalist engineers and continue expanding their platform's social and community-facing features.

The Technology: AT Protocol, Knots, and a Decentralised Code Network

At the heart of Tangled's technical differentiation is its choice of underlying architecture. Rather than building on a traditional centralised server model with a proprietary API layer, Tangled is constructed on top of Bluesky's AT Protocol — the Authenticated Transfer Protocol — an open social networking standard designed to enable portability, interoperability, and user ownership of identity and data across decentralised networks. This is a bold and deliberate choice. The AT Protocol was originally developed to power the decentralised social media network Bluesky, and adapting it for code collaboration is a genuinely novel application of the technology.

What this means in practice is that Tangled operates as a network of "knots" — self-hostable servers where code lives — that are interconnected with one another rather than siloed on a single centralised platform. Developers can host their own instances, retain full ownership over their repositories and contributions, and maintain their professional identity and social graph across the entire open network without depending on any single company's infrastructure. There is no central API layer that can be shut down, modified, or monetised unilaterally by a corporate owner. This makes Tangled structurally resistant to the kind of platform drift that many developers experienced with GitHub after Microsoft's acquisition. Furthermore, because the platform is built on an open protocol, it is uniquely positioned to serve not just human developers but also autonomous AI agents, which is increasingly important as the software industry moves toward agentic programming workflows. Anirudh has noted that one of Tangled's core theses is rebuilding the foundational infrastructure for agentic programming — creating the wiring and framework that AI agents will need to collaborate with humans in shared codebases at scale.

AI Funding and the Bigger Picture: Why This Round Matters for European Tech

This funding round arrives at a particularly significant moment for both the European startup ecosystem and the broader AI funding landscape. The surge in AI-assisted and AI-generated code has contributed to a nearly 50% increase in the number of professional developers globally over the past three years, but the platforms and workflows that support code collaboration have largely failed to keep pace. Most existing tools still operate on legacy, centralised models that were designed for a world in which humans wrote every line of code manually. As AI coding agents become more sophisticated and more deeply embedded in everyday software development, the infrastructure layer beneath them needs to evolve just as dramatically. AI funding news in 2026 has increasingly reflected this realisation, with investors pouring capital into developer tools, code management platforms, and open-source infrastructure that can handle the scale and complexity of AI-driven software creation.

Tangled's €3.8 million round fits squarely within this trend. Antler partner Jussi Kallasvuo captured the investment thesis clearly when he stated that "the bottleneck in software development has shifted from writing code to reviewing and managing it at scale." He went on to describe Tangled as "critical infrastructure for the European tech ecosystem, providing a native alternative to American legacy platforms." This framing is important: the investment is not simply a bet on a better code hosting tool — it is a bet on the idea that Europe needs its own sovereign layer of developer infrastructure, and that the rise of AI in software development makes that need more urgent, not less. Deina Kellezi of byFounders echoed this sentiment, noting the firm's deep excitement about backing founders who are "building the next generation code forge from first principles" at a time when AI coding agents and tools are fundamentally disrupting how software gets made. For The AI World, this represents exactly the kind of forward-looking AI funding news that defines the inflection point we are living through — where developer infrastructure is becoming AI infrastructure, and where the decisions made today about openness, sovereignty, and protocol design will shape the entire software ecosystem for the next decade.

Traction, Users, and What Comes Next

Despite being a young company with a lean team, Tangled has already demonstrated remarkable early traction. The platform first went live in March 2025 as an invite-only product, and within just two hours of the news hitting the internet, it landed on the front page of Hacker News, one of the most influential communities in tech. Demand surged immediately, validating the founders' thesis that there is genuine, latent hunger for a GitHub alternative among developers who feel underserved by the current market. Today, Tangled has accumulated more than 7,000 users, a number that is particularly striking given that the company has not yet executed a full public launch or invested heavily in marketing. The user base is also more geographically diverse than one might expect from a "European" platform: approximately 40 to 50 percent of users are based in the United States, around 40 percent are European, and the remaining 10 percent are spread across Asia. The significant American presence is telling — it suggests that the appeal of Tangled is not purely about European data sovereignty, but about a broader desire among developers globally for a more transparent, open, and community-driven platform.

With the new capital in hand, Tangled plans to invest primarily in engineering talent and platform expansion. The three new generalist engineers they aim to hire will help accelerate both the technical infrastructure and the social collaboration features that make Tangled distinctive. The company is also focused on expanding its community spaces and continuing to build the open protocol foundation that will ultimately allow both humans and autonomous AI agents to participate directly in the network. Thomas Dohmke, one of the angel investors in this round and the former CEO of GitHub who recently raised a record $60 million seed round for his own new developer tools startup Entire, has described the direction as exactly right for the current era of software development. His backing carries particular symbolic weight: here is someone who led GitHub at the height of its AI transformation, choosing to invest in a decentralised, open-source alternative that bets on developer sovereignty over corporate control. The combination of institutional backing from byFounders and Bain Capital Crypto, operational support from Antler, and the strategic credibility brought by angel investors of this calibre gives Tangled a strong foundation from which to pursue its ambitious mission of becoming the foundational layer for the next generation of global software collaboration.