Tangled raises €3.8 million to challenge GitHub with open, decentralised coding platform
Backed by GitHub’s former chief executive and led by byFounders, Helsinki-based Tangled is betting that developers are ready to own their code — and their social graph.
Text by Martti Asikainen, 6.3.2026 | Photo by AI
A Finnish startup that wants to reimagine how developers collaborate on code has closed a €3.8 million seed round, drawing backing from some of the most prominent names in open-source software.
Tangled Labs, founded in 2025 by brothers Akshay and Anirudh Oppiliappan, originally from Bangalore, and now based in London and Helsinki respectively, is building a federated alternative to GitHub designed around decentralisation, developer ownership, and an open protocol rather than a closed corporate platform.
The round was led by byFounders, the community-powered venture capital firm, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and existing investor Antler.
A roster of high-profile angel investors also joined, including Thomas Dohmke, former chief executive of GitHub; Avery Pennarun, chief executive of Tailscale; Mårten Mickos, former chief executive of MySQL and HackerOne; and Sami Honkonen, a Finnish angel investor and founder of DIAS.
– Tangled is built on the belief that code collaboration should be as open and social as the web itself. We are moving beyond the limitations of centralised silos to give developers a platform where they actually own their data and their social graph, the co-founder Anirudh Oppiliappan stated earlier this week.
A European answer to a Microsoft-owned platform
The timing is deliberate. Digital sovereignty has dominated the European technology conversation in 2026, with policymakers and founders alike questioning how much of the continent’s critical infrastructure should rely on American-owned services. For Tangled, that debate extends all the way down to where code itself lives.
The need for an alternative, Anirudh Oppiliappan argues, has been building since Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, a moment he believes shifted the platform’s centre of gravity away from the open-source communities and independent developers that had powered its growth.
The founders operate across two cities: Anirudh from Helsinki, Akshay from London. Both bring experience building large-scale distributed systems and code intelligence platforms at Y Combinator-backed startups. Despite their European base, their ambitions are explicitly global.
As Anirudh puts it: “Tangled is built in Europe, but for the world.” Of the platform’s more than 7,000 users, roughly 40–50 per cent are American, drawn, in part, by Europe’s stronger data privacy laws and a desire to break free from large incumbents.
Built on an open protocol
Tangled is built on the AT Protocol, which is an open, decentralised networking layer originally developed for the Bluesky social network. Rather than relying on a central server or proprietary API, the platform operates across a network of lightweight, self-hostable servers called “knots,” which together form an interconnected web of code repositories.
Developers retain full ownership of their code, their professional connections, and their identity, and can move between nodes without losing any of it.
The platform supports features including stacked pull requests, integrated continuous integration, and social discovery tools that allow communities to self-govern. Its architecture is also designed with artificial intelligence in mind: as AI-assisted coding has driven a near-50 per cent increase in professional developers over the past three years, Tangled is positioning itself as infrastructure capable of supporting both human contributors and autonomous AI agents working side by side.
– The bottleneck in software development has shifted from writing code to reviewing and managing it at scale. This is a critical piece of infrastructure for the European tech ecosystem, providing a native alternative to American legacy platforms, says Jussi Kallasvuo, Partner at Antler.
What the funding will pay for
The fresh capital will be used to accelerate Tangled’s product and infrastructure roadmap throughout 2026. Planned developments include a revamped micro-VM-based continuous integration system (Spindle v2), protocol-level features such as repository migrations and organisation support, a customisable developer dashboard, GitHub migration tooling, advanced code and repository search, and the launch of a dedicated command-line interface. The team, currently lean and fully remote, also plans to hire three additional generalist engineers.
Tangled launched in early 2025 as an invite-only product. Within two hours of its debut being reported on Hacker News, the page reached the front page and demand surged. In its first year, the platform has grown to thousands of users and thousands of repositories — a rate of growth that has attracted not just venture capital, but the attention of figures who know intimately how the incumbents were built.
Deina Kellezi, Investor at byFounders, said the firm was struck by the founders’ technical conviction from the outset. “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,” she said.
You can learn more about Tangled here.
