Cline Raises $32M Building the Open-source AI Coding Agent that Enterprises Trust

Cline has raised $32M in combined Series A and Seed funding, led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital, with participation from 1984 Ventures, Essence VC, Cox Exponential, and angels including Jared Friedman, Theodore Browne, Logan Kilpatrick, Addy Osmani, and Eric Simons who believe in our vision of bringing Cline, the most powerful and trusted AI coding agent, to enterprise developers.

What is Cline?

Cline is an open-source coding agent built on the principle that developers should have full visibility into spend and be able to use the best model available to get the most powerful coding experience possible.

You can use natural language to get complex coding tasks done—whether you're building new projects from scratch or working in large multi-million-line codebases. Cline appeals to a wide range of developers: from non-technical people wanting to build bespoke software for their needs—finance professionals creating financial models or data analysis tools—to serious enterprise software engineers doing their daily work at scale.

But Cline is more than just a product—it's a community. We have 2.7 million installs across VS Marketplace and the Open VSX Registry, 48k stars on GitHub, 48k followers on X, 20k members in our Discord, and an incredible community of developers that use and contribute to helping us build the best open-source coding agent. Cline has also been publicly celebrated as the coding agent of choice by SAP, Samsung, and other Fortune 100 companies.

Here's why developers and enterprise alike love Cline:

• Transparent pricing and data control: You can't get blindsided by pricing changes because we built Cline with API cost visibility and bring-your-own-keys from the start. No hidden price-optimized multi-model orchestration, no throttled context—just use the best model at true cost and push it as far as you want. Anything else encourages a nerfed product and obfuscated pricing. We run entirely on your infrastructure with your API keys, so your code never leaves your control.
• Model agnostic access with no lock-in: Get immediate access to any model—Claude for coding, Gemini for massive context windows, Grok for creative solutions, Kimi-K2 for cost efficiency. Model labs are always one-upping each other with new models that outperform the rest on benchmarks, and you'll never be stuck with a second-tier model because Cline lets you bring the best model, whatever it is, for the job. This also gives freedom to using models running locally on your own hardware, either on your personal computer or your organization’s on-prem infrastructure.
• Open source foundation: Being open source gave us easy adoption in enterprise and lets us harness the power of an open source community. Like many other companies built on open-source foundations, we've found that open source creates a natural path to enterprise adoption. Security teams can audit our code, compliance teams can understand exactly how decisions are made, and engineering teams can extend functionality for their specific workflows.

We built Cline differently. Open source. Open prompts. Open models. Open pricing.

"Cline's unique approach to agentic coding, built on a foundation of open-source transparency, is a paradigm-shift for enterprises seeking to harness the unrestricted power of agentic AI."

Yaz El-Baba, Partner at Emergence Capital

Why now?

What started as an open-source project for hobbyists to push local models or the most expensive, best frontier models to their full potential quickly became a tool used by developers to get serious work done.

Our thesis is simple: inference cannot be the business model. Other tools hide inference costs behind credit systems and confusing subscription models, upcharging on access to language models while using multi-model orchestration with smaller models to protect their margins. This ultimately encourages a much weaker product than what you get when you remove those guardrails and misaligned incentives.

Our approach that inference business practices should not get in the way of building the best coding agent let us cut through the noise in this competitive space with a product that just worked a step above the rest.

We’ve been bombarded by enterprises wanting table-stake features to use Cline more effectively in their organizations. For some of these organizations, particularly Zero Trust enterprises where security isn't a preference but a requirement, the choice isn't which AI coding tool to use—it's Cline or nothing. These engineering teams weren't evaluating Cline against alternatives; they were using Cline because alternatives that route code through external servers simply cannot pass compliance review.

What's next?

With this funding, we're focused on meeting enterprise demand while staying true to our open-source roots:

• Cline Teams launches today with enterprise-grade features including organization management, centralized billing and usage tracking, and enterprise-ready foundations. We're providing customers with the flexibility of using our self-serve enterprise SaaS product, with self-hosted options coming soon for organizations that want even more control. Our new Teams dashboard makes it easier to onboard new team members, manage budgeting, implement access controls, maintain audit logs, and prepare for more advanced features coming to the platform. See here for details: https://cline.bot/teams
• Bringing Cline to more IDEs including JetBrains, terminal-native implementations, and the Cline SDK to make our framework truly ubiquitous across development environments.
• Harnessing the power of team collaboration + intelligence to pull more meaningful context into projects being worked on by many members. We're building features that capture and share the tacit knowledge teams develop–knowledge that isn't in code or docs but lives in prompts, workflows, and organizational rules. Prompts are becoming the new IP, more valuable than the code generated by AI, so we're making it easy for teams to share and build on each other's work.

And of course, we're always working to push the capabilities of our product with new features by translating emerging ingredients in this fast-moving space like MCP and computer use into useful product experiences that feel like magic.

Building the team

This funding allows us to celebrate the incredible team we've put together and continue building beyond our open-source community.

We're hiring engineers, designers, and product leaders who want to shape how the next generation of software gets made. We're expanding our capabilities while staying true to our core principles: transparency over convenience, developer control over vendor lock-in, full model power over margin optimization, and open source over proprietary black boxes.

If you want to help define the future of AI-powered development, check out our careers page.

Join us

Try Cline and experience the difference that transparency and developer control make:

• Try Cline: https://cline.bot
• Cline for Teams: https://cline.bot/teams
• Follow us on Twitter: @cline
• Join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cline
• Contribute on GitHub: https://github.com/cline/cline

Thank you to everyone who made this possible. The early adopters, the contributors, the community that pushed us to think bigger, and the team that came together to build the tool they wished existed.

We're just getting started.

–Saoud Rizwan, Founder/CEO at Cline