Tangled: Bengaluru Brothers Build AI-First GitHub Alternative

An idea with the potential to disrupt the prominent developer platform GitHub is taking shape in Helsinki, Finland, led by two brothers from Bengaluru. Akshay and Anirudh Oppiliappan launched Tangled about a year ago to ensure developer collaboration keeps pace with the growing role of generative AI-based autonomous agents.

“Tangled is our take on the next generation of what social coding or developer collaboration looks like,” said CEO Anirudh in a conversation with Shradha Sharma, founder and CEO of YourStory. Their venture has already organically signed up over 8,000 users and nearly 6,000 repositories. Early last month, Tangled raised about $4.5 million in a seed round led by byFounders, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and Antler, and angel investors.

Three years ago, Akshay moved to London to work with a YC-backed startup, while Anirudh went to Helsinki to work for a cloud provider. Both have experience working at developer tooling startups. “We started Tangled just to solve our own problems with developer tools, and then when we started putting it out, a lot of people sort of reached out and said this is exactly what we want to see from a platform like this,” said Akshay.

At a time when large language models (LLMs) can generate code quickly, the burden is around “reviewing this code and helping build coherent software,” he said. “We are giving developers the tools and the ability to review code much faster and much more efficiently.” Tangled bases itself on the idea that a good code review system is fundamentally important to building good software, even in a future where hundreds of LLMs work together with humans. Akshay said there is value in getting LLMs to review LLM-generated code, adding that having a human in the loop is like having a conductor in an orchestra. The human in the system is being repositioned rather than replaced.

At the heart of Tangled’s approach is a rethinking of the code collaboration system popularized by GitHub, which was founded in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft 10 years later. Anirudh said GitHub pioneered the ‘pull request’ (PR) system, and that hasn’t really changed ever since. But the ecosystem has shifted with AI, and the PR system has proven to be inefficient at reviewing large swathes of code, at least the way GitHub does it.”

An alternative to the GitHub code review system is stacked PRs, which companies such as Google and Meta use. “In simple terms, it allows developers to stack their changes one on top of another and allows for faster and more efficient code review. And this translates very well into the world of LLMs,” he said, explaining why this has been implemented as a first-party feature in Tangled.

The Tangled founders foresee a future when agents operate entirely autonomously, with the humans being “in the loop”, not necessarily at the level of code writing but at a higher architectural level, reviewing changes. The seed investment will be used to expand the team, said Anirudh, “because we’re aiming for a really large problem space here and there’s a lot to cover in terms of product roadmap and infrastructure.” Tangled’s global ambition is reflected in how it operates.

While the company is headquartered in Finland, its footprint spans the UK (Akshay works in London), India, and South Korea, where its engineers are based. Anirudh said the need to understand computer systems at a fundamental level isn’t going away in an era of agents and coding with LLMs because only someone who understands the fundamentals can make high-level decisions to begin with. “So, I would still say learn to code.”