I’m not a traditionally trained programmer. For a while, I thought being fast with Excel hotkeys meant I could do anything.
Then I learned SQL.
Suddenly, I could analyze millions of rows of data, and my computer didn’t crash every 10 minutes. I didn’t make that leap on my own. I was surrounded by some of the smartest engineers and data scientists at LinkedIn: people who were patient enough to sit next to a non-technical finance guy and teach me how to query a relational database.
That kind of pair programming unlocked everything for me.
It gave me confidence. And it made me want to keep going.
Years later, after moving into venture, I wanted to graduate beyond just querying data. I wanted to learn how to build. Not dashboards. Not workflows. Actual software.
But this time, I didn’t have an engineer sitting beside me.
So I looked to AI coding assistants to help lower the learning curve. I tried just about every tool on the market. Some broke down the moment something went wrong. Others made everything so abstract that I couldn’t actually understand what was happening. Most felt like productivity tools for people who already knew how to code—not teammates for someone still figuring it out.
That changed when I met Cline.
By Developers. For Developers
Cline was founded by Saoud Rizwan, a developer with a clear point of view: coding with AI should feel powerful, transparent, and fully under your control. No limits on the models you can use. No artificial constraints on how much context you feed in. No lock-in to a walled-off environment.
When Saoud couldn’t find that kind of experience anywhere, he built it himself.
In July 2024, right after Claude Sonnet 3.5 dropped, he entered an Anthropic hackathon and launched the first version of what would become Cline. It was called “Claude-Dev” back then, and it didn’t win the hackathon. But it did go viral. Saoud open-sourced it from the beginning, and within months, the developer community took notice. Today, Cline has more than 2 million installs, ~50K GitHub stars, and 6,000+ forks.
That momentum isn’t an accident. It’s a reflection of what Cline does differently.
What Makes Cline Special
Cline is built for serious developers and aspiring ones alike. It’s not just another autocomplete tool. It’s a fully agentic coding environment designed to reason across complex systems, operate inside your dev setup, and give you complete visibility into what it’s doing.
A few things that set it apart:
- Model Transparency and Choice
Cline doesn’t profit from inference. That means no incentive to throttle, obscure, or restrict model access. You bring your own API keys (BYOK), choose the model that fits your workflow, and get full transparency into how the agent behaves: every file it reads, every plan it makes, every tool it uses. - Built for Agentic Workflows
Cline doesn’t just autocomplete. It reads your codebase, asks clarifying questions, plans multi-step actions, and navigates real-world development environments. Saoud pioneered the Plan / Act mode that powers this behavior, giving the agent the ability to pause, think, and approach a problem like a real engineer would. - Open Source, On Principle
Cline’s open-source nature is core infrastructure. That “glass box” experience gives users total insight and control, invites contribution, and ensures Cline evolves with (not ahead of) its community. It’s also what enables real trust in high-stakes workflows. - MCP Ecosystem Leadership
Cline was first to embrace the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enable dynamic tool integration. Now, its open MCP marketplace lets developers expand Cline’s capabilities by plugging in third-party tools for debugging, testing, and beyond.
Why We’re Excited
The best tools aren’t just smart. They make you smarter. That’s what Cline did for me. It gave me back the thing I’d been missing since my time on the operating side: a teammate who meets me where I am, shows their work, and helps me get better with every line of code.
This is why we led Cline’s $27M Series A: to back a platform that’s simplifying software development without compromising on transparency or power. We’re grateful to join the incredible early backers from Pace Capital and 1984 Ventures, who led Cline’s $5M seed round and helped lay the foundation for what’s to come.
With 2.5M+ developers already onboarded and the recent launch of Cline Teams, its enterprise offering, that vision is scaling fast. And it’s working: developers are choosing Cline because it gives them something most tools don’t: real control, real insight, and real horsepower.
We’re proud to partner with Saoud and the team as they continue building.
