Members of the Kilo Code team, including Scott Breitenother, its co-founder and CEO, and Sid Sijbrandij, its co-founder and previously the CEO of GitLab, gather for the startup's all-team gathering in Amsterdam in October 2025.
Investors are betting there's room for another startup using artificial intelligence to help software engineers write code faster. The difference with Kilo Code is it counts former GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij among its founders.
On Wednesday, Kilo Code announced $8 million in seed funding, with backing from Breakers, Cota Capital, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital and Tokyo Black.
Sijbrandij is a self-taught developer who helped popularize GitLab's tools for source code collaboration, deployment and testing. GitLab went public in 2021 and is valued at more than $6 billion. Sijbrandij stepped down as CEO last year to focus on cancer treatment but continued as board chair.
Since then, the technology industry has become obsessed with having large language models write and update software, a practice commonly known in Silicon Valley as vibe coding.
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy is credited with coining the term in February. OpenAI looked at buying AI coding startup Windsurf for around $3 billion, but scrapped the plan before Google hired senior Windsurf employees in a $2.4 billion transaction in July. Rival Cursor announced a $2.3 billion funding round in November at a $29.3 billion valuation.
At Microsoft , vibe coding already makes up 30% of the company's code, CEO Satya Nadella said in April.
Sijbrandij witnessed the action and became fascinated by what AI could do for software development. In September, an acquaintance introduced him to Scott Breitenother, who started and later sold consultancy Brooklyn Data.
"I thought we were just kind of having a meet and greet, and then 25 minutes in, Sid's like, 'Hey, can you start next week?'" Breitenother said.
Sijbrandij contributed early capital for the startup, which now employs about 34 people across continents. Breitenother is in charge, but he talks with Sijbrandij many times a day.
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