Tangled, a Helsinki-based code collaboration startup, has closed a €3.8 million ($4.5 million) seed round. The round was led by byFounders, a community-driven venture firm known for an unusual degree of transparency. Bain Capital Crypto and Antler also participated, alongside a group of notable angel investors.
Among those angels are Thomas Dohmke, former CEO of GitHub; Avery Pennarun, CEO of Tailscale; and Mårten Mickos, a veteran of the open-source world.
The developer tools space is dominated by a handful of centralized platforms. For most teams, that means handing over their code, social graphs, and collaboration history to a third party, with limited ability to migrate or self-host. It is a model that has worked at scale, but one that many developers are beginning to question.
Tangled was built to address that tension directly. The company chose to build on the AT Protocol, the same open standard behind the Bluesky social network. This means users can own their code and social data, and the network itself is federated. No single company controls it.
The startup also ships stacked pull requests as a core feature, enabling more efficient contribution and review workflows. It is a pattern popular among engineers at larger organizations, but rarely available out of the box on mainstream platforms.
The team is heads-down on product. For 2026, Tangled has outlined an ambitious roadmap touching almost every part of the platform. That includes a fully revamped CI system, internally called Spindle v2, built on micro virtual machines to enable faster builds and more flexible build environments. Native Nix CI support is also in the works.
Other priorities include protocol-level improvements that will unlock repository migrations across server nodes, a customizable dashboard for tracking active pull requests and issues, a migration tool for teams leaving GitHub, and a full code and repository search feature. The company is also hiring globally. Candidates can apply by emailing the team directly.
Tangled was founded by brothers Anirudh Oppiliappan and Akshay Oppiliappan. What started as a side project grew into a platform with over 7,000 users and more than 5,000 repositories, all without external funding. The company is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland.
The founders have stated their vision plainly: build the best code forge ever and become foundational infrastructure for the next generation of open source. That covers everything from solo developers maintaining niche libraries to engineers running agent-heavy micro-SaaS products.
Tangled's choice of the AT Protocol is not incidental. The protocol enables a federated network where data ownership sits with users, not the platform. It is a deliberate architectural decision, and one that sets the company apart from every major competitor in the space.
byFounders led the round. The firm publishes its standard term sheets publicly, and that commitment to openness was part of why the Tangled founders chose them as their lead investor. The two sides spent months getting to know each other before signing.
Joining byFounders were Bain Capital Crypto and Antler, an early-stage investor with a global presence. The angel group brings strong operational experience in developer tools and open-source software. Thomas Dohmke led GitHub for several years before stepping down in 2024. Avery Pennarun has built Tailscale into one of the most respected networking startups of the past decade. Mårten Mickos is best known for his time as CEO of MySQL and later HackerOne.
