# Saoud Rizwan

> Saoud Rizwan is the founder and CEO of Cline, an open-source AI coding agent that runs inside code editors like VS Code. He built the first version in June 2024, about ten days after Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, as a side project for the company's Build with Claude hackathon. He didn't win, but the project caught fire online and Cline has since passed millions of installs and raised $32M in seed and Series A funding from Emergence Capital and Pace Capital. Before Cline, Rizwan was a prolific iOS and Swift open-source developer. His pitch is unusually blunt for the AI era: Cline captures zero margin on AI usage, shows developers exactly what each request costs, and lets them bring their own models.

- **Role:** Founder and CEO at Cline
- **Organizations:** Cline
- **From:** Indiana, United States
- **Nationality:** American
- **Known for:** Founded and leads Cline, an open-source AI coding agent with over 2.7 million installs, Grew the cline/cline repository to over 65,000 GitHub stars, Raised $32M in seed and Series A funding from Emergence Capital, Pace Capital, and 1984 Ventures

## Career timeline

- **pre-2024** — Prolific iOS and Swift open-source developer, publishing libraries including Disk, CardSlider, DynamicJSON, Dance, and Piano
- **June 2024** — Built the first version of Cline about ten days after Claude 3.5 Sonnet's release, as a project for Anthropic's Build with Claude hackathon
- **2024** — Did not win the hackathon, but the project gained traction online
- **October 2024** — Officially launched Cline
- **July 2025** — Cline raised $32M in combined seed and Series A funding, valuing the company at roughly $110M
- **2026** — Named a JavaOne 2026 speaker; Cline adopted by enterprises including Oracle, Samsung, SAP, and Salesforce

## Achievements

- Founded and leads Cline, an open-source AI coding agent with over 2.7 million installs
- Grew the cline/cline repository to over 65,000 GitHub stars
- Raised $32M in seed and Series A funding from Emergence Capital, Pace Capital, and 1984 Ventures
- Built enterprise adoption at Oracle, Samsung, SAP, and Salesforce
- Powers Oracle's NetSuite SuiteCloud Developer Assistant
- Authored widely used open-source Swift libraries including Disk (3k+ stars) before Cline

## Latest updates

- **2025-07** — Cline announced $32M in combined seed and Series A funding, led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital, at a reported ~$110M valuation.
- **2026-01** — Named a JavaOne 2026 speaker; Cline cited as powering Oracle's NetSuite SuiteCloud Developer Assistant and adopted across Fortune 500 engineering teams.

## Links

- Website: https://cline.bot
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/saoud-rizwan
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/sdrzn
- GitHub: https://github.com/saoudrizwan

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/saoud-rizwan
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-29