GitHits raises €1.5 million to build an AI-native search engine for open-source code
The pre-seed round backs a four-person founding team betting that AI coding agents need a dedicated index of open-source code, rather than general-purpose search — positioning the company against Codex, Claude Code and Cursor as a complement, and against well-funded rival Exa as a narrower, code-only alternative.
Text by Martti Asikainen, 15.7.2026 | Photo by Githits
Finnish startup GitHits has raised €1.5 million in pre-seed funding to build a search engine indexing public open-source code for use by both human developers and AI coding agents.
The round was backed by Finnish venture capital firm Vendep Capital and Estonian firm Trind, alongside angel investors Peter Sarlin, Zach Shelby, and Jerry Liu, co-founder of LlamaIndex.
GitHits, founded in 2025, said the funds will support product development, including a beta launch on the same day as the funding announcement and a first commercial release later this year, though the company gave no specific date for the commercial launch.
AI-native index of public code
GitHits gives AI coding agents access to the open-source code behind an application’s dependencies, helping them find real implementation examples, inspect packages, navigate source code and access documentation, according to the company. It is building what it calls an AI-native, version-aware index of public code, generated on demand.
According to the company’s chief technology officer Olli-Pekka Heinisuo, coding agents are great at navigating your local codebase. The problem is that modern software doesn’t stop at the repository boundary.
“A large part of the system lives in frameworks, libraries, SDKs, and other open-source dependencies. Agents can’t inspect those nearly as well, so AI has to guess, and it produces code that looks correct but doesn’t work in practice”, he says.
“Our vision is to index all public open-source code,” said Jaakko Timonen, chief executive. “With this funding, we are launching the beta version of the product today, and the first commercial version later this year,” he said. The free beta, a command-line tool, launched on Product Hunt the same day.
Heinisuo distinguished GitHits from Exa, a US-based AI search company that raised $250 million in a Series C round in May at a $2.2 billion valuation.
“Exa is building a general-purpose search for AI. GitHits focuses only on code,” he said. “GitHits doesn’t compete with Codex, Claude Code, or Cursor, but complements them by bringing open-source code as context for agents to end retry loops and reduce token consumption.” Neither claim has been independently benchmarked.”
Founders behind the Githits
GitHits was co-founded by Timonen and Heinisuo alongside Nathan Burg and Juha Litola. The company said the idea originated while Heinisuo was working at AI consultancy Softlandia, where he had repeatedly given colleagues the same manual-search tip for locating open-source code, before concluding the problem could be solved with AI. Softlandia supported the spin-out, according to the company.
Heinisuo previously developed opencv-python, a package the company says has more than 100 million downloads and was used in NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, which flew on Mars — a claim not verified for this article.
Timo Felin, a partner at Vendep Capital, said the firm had followed GitHits since its early idea stage. “Olli-Pekka is a quiet legend in open source and has lived inside this problem for years,” Felin said. “At this stage, you invest in people, and this was an easy call.”
A modest round, a heavyweight cap table
GitHits’ raise sits within a wave of recent Finnish and European funding for developer tooling: Helsinki-based Tangled raised €3.8 million in March, Avrea closed a €4 million pre-seed in May, and Cambridge-based Undo secured €31 million in June. Set against those figures, and against Exa’s $250 million round in the adjacent AI-search category, GitHits’ pre-seed is comparatively modest, and its product remains in beta rather than commercial release.
Even so, the round’s investor list carries more name recognition than its size suggests. Jerry Liu co-founded LlamaIndex, a widely used framework for connecting large language models to external data. Peter Sarlin previously built Finnish AI company Silo AI before its sale to AMD, and now leads NestAI, a European defence AI company that has itself attracted significant funding and attention in recent months. Zach Shelby has a background in IoT and machine-learning hardware ventures and at Edge Impulse.
For an unproven, beta-stage product, that roster signals to future investors and customers that experienced operators in adjacent AI infrastructure fields were willing to back the team at the idea stage. Whether that translates into commercial traction is a separate question — investor reputation is not the same as market validation, and GitHits has yet to ship a paying product.
