Building Europe’s native code infrastructure: Tangled closes $4.5M round

The decentralised platform aims to challenge GitHub with federated hosting, stacked PRs, and a community-first model.

GitHub alternative Tangled has raised a $4.5 million funding round. The code platform offers a primary European alternative to GitHub for developers, providing an open and extensible network built for the next generation of software creation.

The funding round was led by byFounders, the community-powered VC firm, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and existing investor Antler. 

Notable angel investors also joined the round, including:

• Thomas Dohmke, the former CEO of GitHub, 
• Avery Pennarun, CEO of Tailscale,
• Mårten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL and HackerOne and
• Sami Honkonen, a prominent Finnish angel investor and the founder of DIAS.

Tangled was founded by brothers Akshay and Anirudh Oppiliappan, who bring extensive experience building large-scale distributed systems and code intelligence platforms at Y Combinator startups. Akshay is based in London, while Anirudh is based in Helsinki, reflecting the company’s cross-border European roots.

I spoke to CEO and co-founder Anirudh to learn all about it.

Beyond Microsoft: Tangled wants to rebuild social coding from first principles

Today, a huge portion of the world’s code is stored in the US and governed by US jurisdiction. GitHub has been the incumbent for around 15 years. But according to Anirudh, after the Microsoft acquisition for $7.5 billion in 2018, there’s been a growing sense of complacency — both in product innovation and in ideology. 

He asserts: 

“A lot of “Microsoft-ism” has seeped into the platform, especially around AI and Copilot. My brother and I felt there was space to rethink social coding from first principles. That became the catalyst for Tangled.”

The brothers are originally from Bangalore. Anirudh moved to Finland about three years ago to work for a Finnish cloud provider, where he spent roughly two and a half years building their managed Kubernetes product.

He admits, “Finnish work life is very comfortable — maybe a little too comfortable for me. I wanted to lean back into my real passion: building developer tools. At the same time, I felt that the code collaboration space hadn’t meaningfully evolved in over a decade.”

Anirudh explained that many developers don’t realise that if their code lives on GitHub, Microsoft is legally entitled — under its terms — to train AI models on that code. 

“For some developers and organisations, that’s not acceptable. They want ownership over their intellectual property and control over how it’s used.

We decided to build Tangled as a decentralised, European company where users can host their own code on their own infrastructure — and share it on their own terms. The jurisdictional aspect matters. Data sovereignty matters.”

Built for indie devs: Tangled bets on community over enterprise

Tangled approach to decentralisation is pragmatic. If you’re used to GitHub, the user experience feels very familiar. But behind the scenes, your code doesn’t have to live on a single central server. “We introduce something called a “Knot” — a lightweight, self-hosted server that runs on your own infrastructure, explained Anirudh.

“You push your code to your Knot, and it federates into Tangled. From a user perspective, everything feels seamless. But in reality, code is distributed across the world.”

The approach has already gained traction. For example, researchers at Cambridge are hosting a Knot on their own infrastructure and collaborating on research codebases there. Schools and student clubs have also adopted the model. Further, Tangled prioritises transparency and developer sovereignty, giving the community a choice. 

“One of our core theses of Tangled is that it should serve indie developers and open-source communities first.” Anirudh asserts: 

“After the acquisition, GitHub went hyper-enterprise. That’s understandable commercially — but it left indie developers underserved.”

Updating the pull request model for agentic coding 

The founders knew that ideology is not enough to win committed users — the product has to be better than what already exists.  Tangled rethinks the pull request model. 

GitHub introduced pull requests in 2009 — it was revolutionary at the time. But according to Anirudh, the model hasn’t evolved to match today’s volume of code, especially in the era of AI-assisted and agentic programming. He explained:

“At companies like Google and Meta, developers don’t rely on the traditional mega-PR model. 

Instead, they use stacked pull requests. Rather than submitting one massive change with thousands of lines of code, you stack small, atomic changes on top of each other. Each change can be reviewed independently. It’s dramatically easier for contributors and reviewers. 

We designed our stacked PR implementation with an ex-Meta engineer who worked on version control tooling there. It’s become one of the biggest draws to Tangled.”

Infrastructure for Agentic programming

Tangled believes the future of software development may involve one developer orchestrating hundreds of agents. Because Tangled is built on the AT Protocol, new actors — human or agent — can participate without relying on a proprietary API.

On GitHub, you’re constrained by API limits and access rules. On Tangled, agents can create repositories, submit pull requests, review code — seamlessly. “

In fact, we’ve already seen autonomous agents create repositories and push code on Tangled,” explained Anirudh.

“Our goal is to become foundational infrastructure for whatever this next era of software development looks like. Tangled is about tightly knit social coding — a platform where ownership, decentralisation, and community aren’t afterthoughts.

Whatever the next generation of collaborative software development becomes — whether it’s indie hackers or autonomous agents — we intend to be the infrastructure layer that enables it.”

The active Tangled community has around 900 members on Discord who directly influence product development, and roughly 18,000 followers on Bluesky. 

“That federated social layer fits naturally with our philosophy, ” explained Anirudh.

Long-term, Tangled wants community spaces to live alongside codebases. 

Anirudh shared: 

“Today, discussions about projects happen on Reddit, Hacker News, or X. It’s fragmented. We’re exploring ways to bring those conversations directly to the platform — whether that means forums or something new entirely. Community is sticky. It’s what builds long-term loyalty.”

Tangled’s Tailscale-inspired strategy

For now, Tangled is not monetising. Instead, its focus is on building the best next-gen code forge. 

“Down the line, we’re inspired by companies like Tailscale: give the product away to individuals and open-source users, and charge businesses for enterprise-level features.

Eighty per cent of users get it free. The twenty per cent who need advanced capabilities — companies — pay.

That approach creates goodwill and love for the product. We’re still designing what that looks like for Tangled, but we won’t paywall core functionality.”

Choosing investors who share the mission

According to Anirudh, the team was very thoughtful about fundraising. 

“Open-source communities can be sceptical of venture capital — and frankly, so are we.”

They found public funding for startups too slow, and eligibility restrictions made it difficult, especially since neither of the founders are European citizens.

“Ultimately, we chose investors who aligned with our philosophy. byFounders stood out because of their community focus and radical transparency — you can literally download the exact term sheet we signed from their website.

We also brought in Bain Capital Crypto, who are deeply technical and bullish on the AT Protocol, which Tangled builds on. And Thomas Domke, former CEO of GitHub, joined as an investor — which felt like strong validation.”

The $4.5 million investment will be used to scale the platform into a foundational environment for software collaboration globally.

Deina Kellezi, Investor at byFounders, comments:

“From the moment we first met the founders, we were extremely impressed by their deep passion, speed of shipping, and vision of wanting to improve how software developers collaborate.

In a world where development is being disrupted by AI coding agents and tools, they are building the next generation code forge from first principles, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner up with them on this journey.”

Jussi Kallasvuo, Partner at Antler, comments:  

“The bottleneck in software development has shifted from writing code to reviewing and managing it at scale. We backed Tangled because the team has the technical depth to build a system that manages this complexity for both humans and AI.

This is a critical piece of infrastructure for the European tech ecosystem, providing a native alternative to American legacy platforms.”