Cline, the open‑source AI coding assistant trusted by millions, has raised $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding. The round was led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital, with participation from 1984 Ventures, Essence VC, Cox Exponential, and prominent angels like Jared Friedman (YC), Eric Simons (Bolt), Logan Kilpatrick, Addy Osmani, and Theo Browne. This capital will fuel the commercial launch of Cline Teams, its enterprise-grade platform, and expand support beyond Visual Studio Code to every development environment.

Founded by Saoud Rizwan, Cline has installed in over 2.7 million developer environments and is used by Fortune 500s like Samsung and SAP - especially in teams requiring strict control over privacy, pricing transparency, and model performance.

Agentic Coding That Doesn’t Compromise Security

Cline is more than autocomplete - it’s an agentic coding assistant that can reason, write multi-file changes, run CLI tasks, and integrate with infrastructure - all under developer supervision. Crucially, it runs on users’ own cloud credentials, never routing private code through external infrastructure.

This zero-trust design aligns with compliance-heavy environments. Enterprises can audit every prompt, model call, and outcome without sacrificing speed or quality.

Enterprise Features Meet Open Transparency

With Cline Teams, the company introduces:

• Organization and role-based access controls with SSO
  
• Centralized billing and usage tracking with spend caps
  
• Enterprise-ready account and compliance infrastructure

This layer of governance makes Cline a safe choice for large-scale adoption - especially in industries where code privacy and cost structure transparency matter.

Market Momentum and Developer-Led Growth

Cline’s community includes 48K GitHub stars, a Discord of 20K members, strong followership across developer channels, and a grassroots movement built around open standards and transparent tooling. This community-first approach enabled fast growth, especially in zero-trust and regulations-heavy environments.

Significant enterprise traction has come from organizations that demand auditability and control - teams where using external services that access code simply isn’t permitted. For them, the choice isn’t competing tools - it’s Cline or nothing.

Here’s the value drop that founders in AI infrastructure should note:

Cline didn’t chase flashy features. It redefined trust. In a rush to integrate AI coding tools, most platforms prioritize convenience and throughput. Cline understood that developers and enterprises avoid unseen costs - not just hidden fees, but hidden inference throttling and blind model performance.

Their thesis: inference cannot be the business model. By offering transparent pricing and open-source agentic coding, they aligned incentives with both individual developers and enterprise buyers. This dual advantage created organic traction - millions of users, low CAC, and enterprise lock-in - because the tool aligned with worst-case developer friction scenarios.

When your product removes fear - fear of code leaks, inference over-billing, or throttled models - adoption becomes not just easy, but inevitable. Developers tell you it works. Enterprises decide they can’t switch. That’s how infrastructure wins.

Founding Team with Deep Domain Roots

Saoud Rizwan’s background in open-source and security infrastructure shaped Cline’s DNA. His insistence on model-agnosticism and code ownership reflects lessons learned from earlier tooling missteps at scale. He built Cline as a distributed agent that respects enterprise boundaries - while still delivering top-tier AI performance.

Angels like Eric Simons, Addy Osmani, and Logan Kilpatrick back the product not just as users, but as believers in the model of open, auditable AI infrastructure.

Scaling with Cline Teams and Beyond

With the fresh capital, Cline will:

• Expand its footprint beyond VS Code into JetBrains, terminal, and web-based editors
  
• Introduce more enterprise features - team rules, policy controls, audit logs
  
• Improve cost predictability, enabling engineering budgets to match AI consumption
  
• Build integrations with common CI/CD workflows and security stacks
  

Their commitment to zero inference markups and full control enables scalable exploitation in enterprises sensitive to both cost and compliance.

Why Cline Represents a New Infrastructure Tier

As AI becomes central to software development, tools like Cline that merge agentic reasoning with trust-first architecture will shape enterprise standards. Instead of delivering boxed features, they redefine developer expectations.

When tools require zero trust, transparent cost, and auditability, they shift from being optional to foundational. That’s what Cline is building: not just a coding assistant, but a platform that becomes the default layer in AI-driven engineering productivity.