SAN FRANCISCO, July 31, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cline, the leading open-source AI coding agent, has raised $32M in total funding, with the most recent Series A round led by Emergence Capital with participation from Pace Capital, 1984 Ventures, Essence VC, Cox Exponential and key developer-focused angel investors, including Jared Friedman (Partner, Y Combinator), Eric Simons (CEO, Bolt.new), Logan Kilpatrick, Addy Osmani, and tech YouTuber Theo Browne.
This investment fuels the launch of Cline Teams, its new enterprise platform designed to bring Cline’s renowned agentic AI coding capabilities to large-scale enterprises. The funding will also be used to grow the Cline team and further expand its product offerings. This includes expanding Cline beyond VS Code to wherever developers write code.
Cline has transformed software development through the world’s most trusted open-source AI coding agent, installed by 2.7 million developers and used by Fortune 500 companies like Samsung, SAP and many others that require strict privacy and control. With Cline, developers get exactly what they pay for: $100 spent on frontier models delivers $100 worth of the best AI intelligence, with no hidden markups or throttling. This transparent approach has resonated with developers who want full-powered AI-driven development without the black box pricing and performance compromises found in subscription-based alternatives.
“Our thesis is simple: inference cannot be the business strategy,” said Saoud Rizwan, Founder of Cline. “What started as an open-source project for hobbyists to push AI models to their full potential quickly became a tool used by millions of developers and organically adopted by enterprises to get serious engineering work done. And today we are announcing an enterprise product that enables enterprises to do what they’ve been asking us for: manage their overwhelming internal usage of Cline to build software faster.”
Cline’s open architecture delivers what others can’t: maximum AI capability without compromise:
- Open-Source: Every line of code auditable, ensuring Cline never throttles performance to protect margins
- Open Prompt: Direct control over context means no hidden prompt manipulation or quality degradation
- Open Model: Instant access to cutting-edge models at full strength – no routing to cheaper alternatives
- Open Pricing: Pay exactly what AI costs with full transparency – no hidden markups or surprise limits
The result: while competitors reduce quality to manage costs or impose sudden usage limits, Cline users continue at full speed with the best models available. This uncompromised approach delivers results: developers report completing entire feature implementations in hours instead of days, with many describing their first experience with Cline as their “AGI moment” – watching an AI truly understand and execute complex, multi-file refactoring that would typically take a senior engineer a full sprint. Because its business model is not built around reselling inference at a margin, Cline can focus on building the most powerful coding agent experience that attracts individual developers and enterprises alike.
Cline benefits from the contributions of an actively engaged open-source developer community from around the world. “We tap into the broader community’s imagination and ingenuity to build a product built by developers, for developers”, says Rizwan. Being open source has also allowed Cline to give more visibility into their development roadmap and receive feedback from their community to help shape the product that’s most useful to them.
Launching Cline Teams
Cline’s open-source foundation enabled easy adoption in organizations with common AI-era concerns around IP protection and data privacy. As enterprise adoption grew, Rizwan and his team found themselves inundated with demands for enterprise features to use Cline more effectively at scale. Cline Teams extends the trusted open-source offering with essential enterprise-grade features for its initial launch, including:
- Organization Management: Easily create and manage your company’s Cline organization, invite team members, and manage access via admin controls, like SSO and role-based access control.
- Centralized Billing & Usage Tracking: Select from clear plan tiers, manage seats, control inference spending with auto top-up rules, and access detailed usage logs for both individuals and the organization.
- Enterprise-Ready Foundations: Built with robust account management and payment integrations, laying the groundwork for future advanced security and policy controls.
“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,” said Yaz El-Baba, Partner at Emergence Capital. “Empowering developers and enterprises with the launch of Cline Teams and Enterprise marks a pivotal moment for both Cline’s future and the next step in agentic AI.”
This architecture has made Cline the default choice for Zero Trust Enterprises – organizations where security isn’t just a preference but a strict requirement. Engineering teams at Fortune 100 companies aren’t evaluating Cline against alternatives; they’re using Cline because alternatives that route code through external servers simply cannot pass compliance review. For these organizations, the choice isn’t which AI coding tool to use – it’s Cline or nothing.
Call to Action: To learn more about Cline and the new Cline Teams platform, visit cline.bot/enterprise
About Cline: Cline is the company behind the leading open-source AI coding agent, dedicated to transforming software development through transparent, powerful, and collaborative AI. Founded by Saoud Rizwan, Cline provides developers with unobfuscated access to leading AI models, enabling deep codebase interaction, full-context reasoning, and a true human-in-the-loop experience. With a commitment to open-source principles, open-prompt control, and open pricing, Cline empowers individual developers and large enterprises to build better software, faster. The Cline Teams platform extends these capabilities with enterprise-grade security, administration, and governance features, making agentic AI a secure and scalable reality for organizations worldwide.
Contact: Nick Baumann nick@cline.bot
