Kilo Code raises $8M in seed funding as its open-source AI coding agent hits #1 on OpenRouter

Kilo Code is moving quickly — and investors are paying attention.

The AI startup behind the open-source AI coding agent has raised $8 million in seed funding, led by Cota Capital, with participation from Breakers, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital, and Tokyo Black. Since launching in early 2025, Kilo has crossed 750,000 downloads and climbed to the top spot on OpenRouter, signaling strong developer pull in a crowded AI coding market.

“Today we announced that Kilo Code has raised $8m in seed funding. The funding round was led by Cota Capital with participation from Breakers, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital, and Tokyo Black. This is an exciting moment for us and I want to pause and share why I am personally so energized about Kilo,” the AI startup said in a blog post.

The pitch behind Kilo is simple: AI coding tools were supposed to help engineers move faster, yet many have started slowing teams down. Model downgrades, rate limits, unclear pricing, and closed ecosystems have created friction that developers didn’t sign up for. Kilo’s founders see that tension as an opportunity.

With $8M Seed, AI Startup Kilo Code Bets on Speed as Developers Push Back Against Slower AI Coding Tools

Kilo positions itself as a tool that works wherever developers already do. It runs in VS Code and JetBrains, works on the command line, and extends to the cloud. Teams can manage agentic coding, low-code app creation, and deployment from one system. Company leaders point to early customer feedback showing productivity gains measured in weeks, not quarters.

“At Cota Capital, we back companies building the infrastructure that will define the next era of software, and we see Kilo doing this,” said Aditya Singh, General Partner at Cota Capital. “Kilo’s vision to build an all-in-one, agentic experience for software developers is what the space needs. Engineering leaders seek simple pricing, high-quality code, and model access to stay ahead of the rapid changes in AI.”

Product velocity had played a major role in Kilo’s early traction. Over the past month, the company rolled out parallel agents, one-click deployment, AI-driven code review, cloud agents, and managed indexing. Developers have access to more than 500 models, with new ones added weekly, giving teams the flexibility to choose the right model for each task rather than being locked into a single provider.

Kilo works closely with established AI labs such as Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Mistral, as well as newer model builders, to ensure models perform well on the platform. Access to early and frontier models has helped fuel adoption. Today, Kilo processes more than 6.1 trillion tokens each month.

The company was co-founded by Scott Breitenother, founder of Brooklyn Data, and Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab’s co-founder and executive chair. Their shared view is that speed has become the deciding factor for modern engineering teams.

“Everything we do at Kilo is in pursuit of Kilo Speed,” said Breitenother, who serves as CEO. “We believe this is the new standard for how engineering teams develop and deploy software, and our mission is to help all engineering teams operate at this pace.”

With fresh capital in hand, Kilo plans to further expand its position as a single home for agent-driven software development. The focus remains on removing friction, keeping pricing clear, and letting developers choose how and where they build — a bet that speed, freedom, and openness still matter as AI coding tools proliferate.