Finland-based software startup Tangled Labs Oy today announced it has raised $4.5 million to build a GitHub alternative based around social coding collaboration.

ByFounders led the seed financing round, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto, Antler, former GitHub Inc. Chief Executive Thomas Dohmke and Tailscale Inc. CEO Avery Pennarun, among other angels.

Founded in 2025, Tangled develops a next-generation federated social coding platform built atop the AT protocol. The Authenticated Transfer protocol is the same decentralized network paradigm that underlies Bluesky Social PBC, the social platform that arose as an alternative to X Corp., formerly Twitter.

The platform supports features for developers such as stacked pull requests, continuous integration and social discovery tools. It is designed to allow communities to spin themselves up and self-govern without a central authority or website by making collaborative software development the norm on a distributed network.

Like GitHub, Tangled is a code repository where developers upload and store code files and snippets with full historical audit trails and branch controls. This allows development teams to collaboratively build projects together, split projects in separate directions with the same underlying code and even merge changes back together, or roll back broken code when necessary.

The underlying vision of Tangled is that users self-host their repositories as “knots,” a reference to tree branches, which act as code storage repositories. Similar to Bluesky, login and user identity are managed by a decentralized authority, allowing users to move their reputation and data between applications. Social collaboration is natively integrated and issues — where developers comment on bugs, feature requests and other communication — are threaded, allowing for complex discussions.

The company said the platform is built with the ongoing artificial intelligence developer renaissance in mind. AI agents can act as co-contributors, create repositories, submit pull requests and review code directly on the network. This is permissible by providing a full-fledged XRPC application programming interface, used by the AT protocol for management and authentication.

The company’s website is currently minimalistic and caters to the developer crowd. For those interested in jumping on the bandwagon, there is comprehensive developer documentation available, including a quick start guide for hitting the ground running.

Citing recent results and metrics, Tangled said that although the social repository started as a “side project,” it grew to more than 7,000 users who have created more than 5,000 repositories.

In 2026, the company said it wants to build micro virtual machines to allow faster builds and greater choice of build environments. It will work towards a customizable “mission control” dashboard for active issues and requests and anything that can be tracked about a project. For users coming from GitHub, a migration tool is also planned, as is a command-line interface tool.

As a potential alternative to GitHub, Tangled could be a passing fancy or an interesting social collaboration interface that uses Bluesky’s decentralization innovation. Depending on the specific metric used, GitHub currently holds an estimated 88% market share, according to 6sense, and ranks solidly as No. 1.

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