Cline AI
Cline is an open-source AI coding agent that enables developers and enterprises to build software faster through agentic AI coding with full transparency, control, and privacy.
Founding Story
Cline was developed in July 2024 by Saoud Rizwan in a garage in Terre Haute, Indiana as a demo for Anthropic's Build with Claude hackathon. The goal was to give AI models developer tools like file access and terminal commands. Although the demo did not win the hackathon, it was released to the developer community and grew organically. Rizwan moved to San Francisco in November 2024 to build the startup, and what began as a solo weekend project has grown into a team of over 35 people, many of whom were originally open source contributors hired full-time.
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Leadership
Founders
Saoud Rizwan
28-year-old founder and software engineer with 10 years of experience in iOS engineering, specializing in product leadership, file-system interaction, local data persistence, and developer ergonomics. Previously developed open-source frameworks including Disk and Piano for iOS.
Executive Team
Saoud Rizwan
Founder and CEO
Software engineer with 10 years of experience, specializing in iOS development and developer tooling. Previously built open-source frameworks for iOS.
Nick Baumann
Team member (role not specified)
Contact person for Cline, active in blog writing and product development.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Usage-based pricing for AI inference without markups or subscriptions for individuals. Users pay only for AI credits consumed at cost or bring their own API keys (BYOK). Teams tier uses per-user subscription model ($20/month per user after Q1 2026, first 10 seats free). Enterprise tier uses custom pricing. Revenue also comes from helping large organizations manage their organic Cline usage.
Pricing Tiers
VS Code Extension, CLI, secure client-side architecture, purchase inference at cost or BYOK, MCP Marketplace, multi-root workspaces, community support.
All Open Source features plus JetBrains extension, centralized billing (credits at no markup), config management, role-based access control, limit inference providers, team management dashboard, priority support.
All Teams features plus SSO, OIDC, SCIM provisioning, SLA, dedicated support, authentication logs, audit logs, VPC deployments, OpenTelemetry, advanced config management, fine-grained permissioning.
Target Markets
- Individual software developers
- Enterprise software development teams
- DevX (Developer Experience) teams
- Platform teams
- Fortune 500 companies
- Regulated industries requiring data privacy and security
- Codebase understanding and analysis
- Large-scale refactoring across multiple files
- Automated code reviews and pull request generation
- Integration with incident response systems and Sentry webhooks
- Slack-triggered code reviews
- Building custom internal developer tooling
- Samsung
- SAP
- Salesforce
- Amazon
History & Milestones
Surpassed 5 million installations across VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, Windsurf, and OpenVSX
Launched $1 million Open Source Grant Program to fund open source projects
OpenAI hired at least seven employees from Cline (not an acquisition)
Raised $27M Series A led by Emergence Capital and launched Cline Teams enterprise platform
Reached 57,000 GitHub stars and became fastest-growing AI open source project by contributors (4,704% YoY growth)
