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Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cline develops an open-source, agentic artificial intelligence coding environment that automates complex software development workflows. The platform functions as an autonomous pair programmer capable of reading and editing files, executing terminal commands, and navigating browsers to complete deep engineering tasks. The software has achieved significant scale within the developer tools sector, accumulating over two million total installations and supporting more than one million active developers specifically on the VS Code platform. Operating with venture capital backing from investors including Emergence Capital and Yaz El-Baba, the project maintains a highly active open-source community with approximately 50,000 GitHub stars and over 6,000 repository forks. The company also receives substantial external code contributions, with over half of its monthly pull requests originating from outside developers. The organization was founded in 2024 by Saoud Rizwan.
Cline has raised $27.0M across 1 funding round.
Cline has raised $27.0M in total across 1 funding round.
Cline has raised $27.0M in total across 1 funding round.
Cline's investors include Comal Ventures, Emergence Capital, Y Combinator, Charles Zedlewski.
Cline has raised $27.0M across 1 funding round. Most recently, it raised $27.0M Series A in July 2025.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 1, 2025 | $27M Series A | — | Comal Ventures, Emergence Capital, Y Combinator, Charles Zedlewski | Announced |
Cline is an open-source AI coding agent designed for developers, integrating with tools like Visual Studio Code to automate coding tasks, plan changes across codebases, and support terminal-first workflows.[1][2][3] It serves software engineers and enterprises by solving inefficiencies in code writing, testing, and maintenance through model-agnostic access to frontier AI models, full visibility into costs, and features like Plan Mode for previewing actions before execution.[1][3][4] Cline recently raised $32M in combined Series A and Seed funding in July 2025, led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital, signaling strong growth momentum amid rising demand for trusted, transparent AI tools in enterprise development.[1]
The platform emphasizes developer control, allowing use of any top-performing model—local or cloud-based—without vendor lock-in, while launching enterprise features like Cline Teams for organization management, centralized billing, and knowledge-sharing workflows.[1]
Cline emerged from the need for a powerful, transparent AI coding agent that enterprises could trust, founded on open-source principles to drive rapid adoption.[1] Key details on founders are not specified in available sources, but the project gained traction through its integration with popular IDEs like VS Code and its ability to handle complex tasks, such as building entire projects from scratch while understanding existing codebases.[1][3][4] A pivotal moment came with the July 2025 $32M funding round, led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital, with participation from 1984 Ventures, Essence VC, Cox Exponential, and notable angels like Jared Friedman and Addy Osmani, enabling launches like Cline Teams and self-hosted options.[1]
Early demos highlighted its Plan/Act model, where it plans multi-step changes (e.g., UI elements, data tracking) before executing, differentiating it from simpler code completers.[4]
Cline rides the trend of intelligent, tool-enabled coding agents transforming software development from manual coding to AI-orchestrated planning and execution.[1][3][4] Timing aligns with explosive growth in AI models and open-source adoption, where enterprises demand visibility into spend and data amid model labs' rapid benchmarking wars.[1] Market forces favoring Cline include rising developer productivity needs, shift to terminal/CLI workflows, and aversion to locked-in proprietary tools, positioning it to influence the ecosystem by democratizing frontier-model power via open source.[1][3]
It accelerates the "Plan/Act" paradigm, enabling AI to handle full projects while humans oversee, as seen in real-time optimizations and tests.[4]
Cline's $32M raise and enterprise launches position it for scaled adoption, with self-hosted options and knowledge-sharing features targeting large teams.[1] Upcoming trends like multimodal models and deeper IDE integrations will amplify its edge, evolving its influence from dev tool to ecosystem standard for transparent AI coding.[1][3] As open-source AI agents mature, Cline could redefine enterprise development, empowering developers with uncompromised control in an AI-driven world—fulfilling its vision of trusted, powerful coding at scale.[1]
