Open-Source Was the Trojan Horse. What Cline Built Is an Agentic OS

Yesterday, Cline’s founder Saoud Rizwan announced a $27 million Series A funding round. The number wasn’t what stood out. The investors: Emergence, Pace, 1984 Ventures, were not unusual for a startup at this stage. What raised eyebrows was the install base: 2.7 million developers, most of them acquired without a marketing budget. Cline is often described as an “open-source Cursor,” shorthand for a growing category of developer tools that integrate large language models into code editing environments. Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Copilot, Solver: the list grows longer each month. But while those competitors fight for market share through subsidized pricing, aggressive model orchestration, or raw autocomplete speed, Cline has taken a slower, stranger route. To the casual obse