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.