The infrastructure of modern software development has reached a point of comfortable stagnation. For over a decade, the global developer community has relied on a handful of massive platforms like GitHub and GitLab. While these systems are reliable for enterprise scale, they have slowly evolved into rigid silos. They often prioritize corporate control over the creative and social needs of the individual builder. Coding is at its heart a collaborative and communal act, yet the current landscape feels more like a filing system than a vibrant network.
When we first met Anirudh and Akshay Oppiliappan, they were not just proposing a faster repository. They were building a vision for how developers interact and share in an increasingly decentralized world. That vision recently gained massive momentum with a 3.8-million-euro seed round led by byFounders, with participation from Antler and Bain Capital Crypto. The fact that the round also includes former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke signals that the people who built the incumbents see the necessity for this new direction.
A digital landscape built on silos
The primary issue with the current market leaders is that they function as storage units rather than social networks. Discoverability is difficult and true collaboration often requires a messy patchwork of external tools. Furthermore, there is a growing urgency around digital sovereignty within Europe. Most developers currently store their intellectual property on servers controlled by US based tech giants. There is a clear opening for a platform that offers the freedom of decentralization and local data control without sacrificing the seamless experience modern developers expect.
Reimagining code through social interaction
Tangled is a code repository platform built on the AT Protocol, designed to bring the social back to the center of software development. By using a decentralized architecture, Tangled allows users to truly own their data and even choose to self-host their repositories.
The real innovation lies in the social layer. Tangled goes beyond being a simple code repository by introducing social and community features that encourage collaboration. Developers can participate in contribution challenges, pick up issues from public projects, and engage with others across the network. These mechanisms create an environment where code bases evolve as living communities, giving builders both motivation and visibility while contributing to shared projects. It is a platform built for the era of AI native development and what is often called vibe coding. This is a world where the speed of creation is matched by the ease of collaboration. It provides a lightweight and transparent environment that caters to the next generation of software creators.
Builders with relentless velocity
When we look for founders to back, we search for people who are fundamentally obsessed with the problem they are solving. Anirudh and Akshay are exactly that. They are young, highly technical, and deeply opinionated about the space they are building in. Anirudh brings a strong engineering background from his time at UpCloud, while Akshay joined the mission from Bloop.ai, a YC-backed startup in London.
What impressed us most from the beginning was their execution speed. They built the core of Tangled before joining our residency, driven by pure passion for the project. As brothers, they possess a level of trust and an unfiltered communication style that allows them to iterate faster than almost any team we have seen. They are technical builders who also happen to be exceptional communicators. This is a rare combination that is essential for building a community driven platform.
The momentum of a new movement
The signals of organic growth were impossible to ignore from the very start. Within hours of their first post on Hacker News, Tangled reached the front page and saw a surge of activity that spread to Bluesky and beyond. We watched as complete strangers began writing blog posts and mapping the early user network. This level of pull from a highly technical audience is the ultimate validation of product market fit.
With over 7,000 users already building on the platform, Tangled is rapidly becoming a European answer to American legacy platforms. As the bottleneck in software shifts from writing code to reviewing and managing it at scale, the world needs a native alternative that can handle both human and AI contributors. We believe that by focusing on the developer experience and harnessing true network effects, Tangled will become a fundamental piece of the next generation of the internet.
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