Anirudh and Akshay Oppiliappan / Tangled founders
“Digital sovereignty” has been a hot topic in Europe for the past few years, and it has been the buzzword of 2026 so far.
From cloud infrastructure to AI regulation, policymakers and founders alike have debated how much of the continent’s technological backbone should rest in American hands. Now, a pair of brothers building between Helsinki and London are bringing the debate right down to the level of where code itself lives.
Tangled, a next-generation code collaboration platform founded by Akshay and Anirudh Oppiliappan, is positioning itself as a European, open-source alternative to GitHub — one designed around decentralisation, transparency and developer ownership.
In an interview with Pathfounders, Anirudh Oppiliappan detailed the company’s mission to “giv[e] the community a choice that prioritises transparency and developer sovereignty”.
The brothers have just secured $4.5m to work on that mission. The funding round was led by byFounders alongside Bain Capital Crypto, Antler and a number of prominent angels including the former CEO of GitHub, Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Tailscale, Avery Pennarun and former CEO of MySQL and HackerOne, Mårten Mickos.
Dohmke left GitHub last August after four years as CEO and last week raised $60m at a $300m valuation for his new startup Entire, an open source tool to help developers manage AI agent-written code.
He was at one point rumoured to be working on an alternative to GitHub which is how Oppiliappan originally crossed paths with Dohmke, but it turned out he wasn’t and instead decided to back the startup.
While the brothers are Indian by origin, their geographic and regulatory “European” framing is something they thought about from the outset. Anirudh moved to Helsinki for a role at Finnish cloud provider UpCloud around the same time Akshay relocated to London to join code search engine Bloop and they were conscious of building within European jurisdiction.
“We get that there’s data privacy laws that are way better here and we’re happy to be building within the jurisdiction, and having our data protected by that,” Anirudh Oppiliappan tells Pathfounders. “But we love to say that Tangled is built in Europe, but for the world.”
But they do reap the benefits of being a “European” company, and even the American users want to take advantage of that.
GitHub is an aging platform that hasn’t really meaningfully improved in time
Of Tangled’s more than 7,000 users, around 40–50% are American, roughly 40% European and about 10% based in Asia. For some US developers, the appeal lies partly in Europe’s regulatory environment and a desire for alternatives to large American incumbents.
The need for that alternative, according to Oppiliappan, has been building since Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018. He argues that the platform’s centre of gravity shifted away from the open-source communities and independent developers that fuelled its rise.
“The open source communities and indie devs who made GitHub what it is today, they became the underserved user group on the platform, and there were no features or product development being targeted towards [them],” he says. “And then, of course, there’s also the looming ideological angle of Microsoft and I guess Copilot and all of their hyper AI stuff, which, to be fair, we are not opposed to , but we are also a lot more thoughtful about how we want to implement AI stuff down the line and not just shove it down your gullet, like how Microsoft does it.”
He added that GitHub itself is an “aging platform that hasn’t really meaningfully improved in time”. That’s why the brothers are trying to position Tangled as “the next generation of social coding and collaboration”.
The name is a nod to that vision. Tangled refers to a decentralised space made up of “knots” — self-hostable servers where code lives — forming an interconnected network rather than a single centralised repository. Instead of relying on a traditional API model, Tangled is built on Bluesky’s AT (Authenticated Transfer) Protocol, the open social networking protocol designed to enable portability and interoperability. By removing a central API layer, the founders say developers gain greater ownership over their work, identity and connections across an open network.
That open protocol architecture is also central to how Tangled views the future of software development in an AI-driven world.
“One of our core theses is that we need to fundamentally rebuild the foundational infrastructure for agentic programming,” Oppiliappan says. “As these agents become more and more autonomous and start working more autonomously in developing and writing code and features, we need this infrastructure piece — or some sort of wiring or framework — for them to hop on and operate on.”
Because Tangled is built on an open protocol, he sees Tangled as positioned to do just that.
In other words, the company is not just trying to compete with GitHub as it exists today, but to lay groundwork for a world in which AI agents collaborate alongside humans in shared codebases. The AT Protocol, originally developed for social networking, could also underpin interactions between “agentic actors” in the future.
Tangled went live last March, initially as an invite-only product. Within two hours news of the startup landed on the front page of Hacker News and demand surged. Since then, the team has remained lean and fully remote: one founder in Helsinki, the other in London.
They have hired one engineer from South Korea, who they discovered through their Discord community, and another who previously worked with Anirudh. With fresh capital, they plan to bring on three more generalist engineers while continuing to expand their social and community spaces.
“The bottleneck in software development has shifted from writing code to reviewing and managing it at scale,” Antler partner Jussi Kallasvuo said in a statement. “We backed Tangled because the team has the technical depth to build a system that manages this complexity for both humans and AI. This is a critical piece of infrastructure for the European tech ecosystem, providing a native alternative to American legacy platforms.”