Cline
Cline (Cline Bot Inc.) is an open-source Apache 2.0 AI coding agent platform, shipping as IDE extensions, a CLI, a Kanban orchestrator, and a TypeScript SDK. It serves individual developers (8M+ installs) and Fortune 500 enterprises (Samsung, Salesforce, Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Visa, IBM) via per-seat teams and usage-based API monetization.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2024
- HeadquartersSan Francisco, United States
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B and B2C
- OfferingSoftware
What Cline does
Cline (Cline Bot Inc.) is an open-source AI coding agent platform distributed under Apache 2.0 that operates inside developers' editors, terminals, and CI pipelines. The core stack is a four-layer modular TypeScript SDK (@cline/sdk: shared utilities, provider gateway, browser-compatible stateless loop, Node runtime) that powers multiple end-user surfaces: a Cline IDE extension (VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, Zed, Neovim via ACP), a headless-capable Cline CLI distributed via `npm i -g cline`, a Cline Kanban web orchestrator that runs parallel agents with per-card worktrees and dependency chains, and Cline Teams for managed enterprise deployments. The product is model-agnostic across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS Bedrock, Azure, GCP Vertex, Ollama, DeepSeek, xAI, Mistral, Cerebras, OpenRouter, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with Plan-and-Act human-in-the-loop approval, MCP-based extensibility, and an open codebase that enables on-prem and air-gapped deployment.
Cline's business model combines freemium open-source distribution with two monetization layers. On the PLG side, individual developers install the open-source extension free and either bring their own API keys (no Cline revenue) or purchase recurring usage-credit subscriptions that Cline uses to bill model providers. On the enterprise side, Cline Teams sells per-seat subscriptions via a Contact Sales motion with SSO, RBAC, model/tool controls, OpenTelemetry/Datadog/Grafana/Splunk observability, remote configuration, and audit trails. The jointly developed "Cline Spec Driven for Enterprise" platform with LG CNS extends the model into regulated, full-lifecycle enterprise IT development (initial deployment: COBOL-to-Java conversion at a major financial institution).
Go-to-market combines product-led growth (marketplace distribution, 8M+ installs, 63.8k GitHub stars), community-led growth (Discord, Reddit, GitHub Discussions, X, LinkedIn, and a $1M open-source grant program), enterprise field sales (Cline Teams targeting Fortune 500 logos including Samsung, Salesforce, Oracle, Amazon, LG, Globant, Microsoft, eBay, Visa, and IBM), and channel partnerships with hyperscalers and infrastructure providers (LG CNS as global SI, plus CoreWeave, Cerebras, Mistral, and Snyk co-sell). The company was founded in 2024, is headquartered in San Francisco with Delaware incorporation, had 11-50 employees, and had raised a combined $32M in Seed ($5M, Nov 2024) and Series A ($27M, Jul 2025) led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital as of the input data.
Cline firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Cline
- Legal name
- Cline Bot Inc.
- Website
- https://cline.bot
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2024
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Short description
- Cline (Cline Bot Inc.) is an open-source Apache 2.0 AI coding agent platform, shipping as IDE extensions, a CLI, a Kanban orchestrator, and a TypeScript SDK. It serves individual developers (8M+ installs) and Fortune 500 enterprises (Samsung, Salesforce, Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, Visa, IBM) via per-seat teams and usage-based API monetization.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Cline industry classification
Industry- Product category
- AI Coding Agent / Developer Tools
- NAICS
- Software Publishers (513210), Software Publishers (51321)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)
- akta.pro primary industry
- AI Application Enablement Platforms (Copilot/Agent Frameworks, SDKs) (HDAEANAJ)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- AI Integration & Orchestration Platforms (Connectors, Workflow, iPaaS for AI) (HDAEANAI), Developer Tooling & SDK Platforms (BPAMAOAD)
Keywords
Where Cline is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- San Francisco
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices2 records
Markets served
Cline business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B and B2C
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Personnel, Operations, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure
Revenue model
- Per-seat Subscription: Recurring subscription plans for Cline Teams (enterprise tier) billed automatically with subscription fees and applicable taxes, including free trials that auto-convert to paid.
- Usage credit subscriptions: Recurring credit-purchase subscriptions where users/consumers can buy usage credits that draw down as they invoke AI model providers.
- Freemium / open-source distribution: Apache 2.0 open-source product distributed free; customers pay only when they consume Cline-provided API keys (Cline bills model providers and recovers via credit purchases) rather than bringing their own keys.
- Enterprise contracts and add-ons: Enterprise agreements for Cline Teams including SSO, RBAC, model/tool controls, remote configuration, OpenTelemetry/Datadog/Grafana/Splunk observability, and team management (custom pricing via Contact Sales).
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Pay-as-you-go | Free open-source self-serve tier |
| Usage-based | Monthly | Cline-provided API keys with usage credits |
| Per seat | Annual | Cline Teams / Enterprise per-seat subscription |
Go-to-market motion4 records
Distribution channels6 records
Marketing channels8 records
Cline product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Cline builds and distributes an open-source (Apache 2.0) AI coding agent that automates software creation tasks inside developer environments. Its products include the Cline IDE extension (VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Neovim), the Cline CLI for terminal/CI usage, the @cline/sdk TypeScript SDK for embedding the agent into third-party products, the Cline Kanban multi-agent orchestration layer, and the Cline Teams enterprise platform with SSO, RBAC, audit trails, and observability. Revenue comes from usage-credit subscriptions (when customers use Cline-provided API keys), per-seat Cline Teams enterprise subscriptions, and a $1M open source grant program.
Product overview
Cline is an open-source AI coding agent platform distributed under Apache 2.0 with a modular product architecture built around a shared agent core. The Cline IDE (VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, Zed, and Neovim extensions) and the Cline CLI are end-user surfaces, both powered by the same open-source Cline SDK (@cline/sdk) TypeScript runtime that ships a four-layer modular stack (shared utilities, provider gateway, browser-compatible stateless loop, Node runtime). On top of that core, Cline Kanban provides a web-based multi-agent orchestration task board for parallel linked-task workflows, while Cline Teams delivers the enterprise platform layer with SSO, centralized model endpoints, audit trails, and observability. The jointly developed "Cline Spec Driven for Enterprise" extends the platform for large-scale enterprise IT development with LG CNS, and the MCP Marketplace lets users register custom tools and integrations. Together, these products cover individual developer workflows, headless CI/CD automation, multi-agent orchestration, and regulated enterprise deployments.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Cline Teams: Enterprise platform for large-scale companies, launched with the July 2025 funding round to extend Cline's open-source AI coding agent to enterprise teams with centralized management and security features.
- Cline SDK
- Cline Kanban
Quantifiable outcome
- 74.2% on Terminal Benchmark 2.0 (vs 69.4% Claude Code with claude-opus-4.7), completing tasks faster at lower token cost
- +4 more outcomes
Companies that use Cline
Customer profileNamed customers10 records
Segments4 records
Ideal customer profiles3 records
Cline technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration32 records
AI capability10 records
Feature9 records
Cline partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Eight partnerships are on record, tiered flagship and core.
- LG CNSflagshipLG CNS and Cline jointly launched 'Cline Spec Driven for Enterprise', an agentic AI platform that automates the full enterprise IT system development lifecycle using a Knowledge Foundation ontology database. The platform is being deployed for COBOL-to-Java modernization at a major financial institution and is planned for expansion across finance, public services, manufacturing, and defense globally (including U.S., Japan, Southeast Asia).
- CoreWeavecoreCoreWeave's W&B Inference is integrated into the Cline ecosystem, giving Cline access to NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super, Kimi K2.5, GLM5, MiniMax M2.5, and other open-weights models, plus W&B Weave observability. The integration was demonstrated at NVIDIA's GTC conference and targets high-performance, low-latency multi-step agentic workflows.
- SnykcoreSnyk announced a strategic partnership with Cline Bot Inc. to embed Snyk's security intelligence directly into Cline's autonomous coding platform via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Enables real-time vulnerability scanning and autonomous repair within the agent's coding workflow, addressing the review bottleneck in machine-speed code generation.
- AnthropiccoreAnthropic Claude is supported as a first-class model provider on cline.bot; Cline CLI achieved 74.2% on Terminal Benchmark 2.0 with claude-opus-4.7.
- OpenAIcoreOpenAI GPT models (including gpt-oss:120b for the SIGKILL inference race) are supported as model providers on cline.bot, with Cline functioning as an OpenAI-compatible client.
- GooglecoreGoogle Gemini is supported as a model provider via the Gemini API and Google Cloud's Vertex AI.
- Amazon Web Services (Bedrock)coreAWS Bedrock is supported as a model provider, enabling Cline users to invoke multiple foundation models through AWS.
- OllamacoreOllama is supported as a local-model provider enabling fully offline/air-gapped inference (e.g., qwen2.5-coder:7b/32b) for regulated environments.
Scale indicators7 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights6 records
Cline competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Anysphere (Cursor): Cursor is the most direct competitor — an AI-native IDE built around autonomous coding agents. Both target software developers with model-agnostic coding assistants and compete for the same Fortune 500 and individual developer wallet.
- Claude Code (Anthropic): Anthropic's CLI-based coding agent competes head-to-head with Cline CLI on terminal workflows, multi-file edits, and Plan/Act-style execution — and shares the same frontier-model quality axis (Terminal Benchmark 2.0 results cited by Cline are directly against Claude Code).
- Codeium (Windsurf): Codeium's Windsurf IDE is an AI-native coding environment with similar agent capabilities and a free tier — competing for the same developers and now serving as a marketplace surface where Cline is also distributed.
- Sourcegraph (Cody/Amp): Sourcegraph's Cody and Amp agents provide enterprise-grade AI coding with codebase context, code review, and audit features — targeting the same regulated-enterprise segment that Cline Teams addresses, with comparable multi-model support.
- Tabnine: Tabnine is an AI coding assistant focused on enterprise deployments with privacy-preserving on-prem inference and code-completion-to-agent capabilities — overlapping with Cline's regulated-industry value proposition.
Broad incumbents
- GitHub Copilot: Microsoft's GitHub Copilot is the incumbent AI coding assistant distributed natively inside VS Code, GitHub.com, and the Microsoft enterprise stack — overlapping with Cline's IDE-embedded coding agent functionality but bundled into a much broader developer platform.
- JetBrains AI Assistant: JetBrains ships a first-party AI Assistant inside its IDE family (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm), which is also one of Cline's distribution surfaces — competing directly at the IDE plugin level for the JetBrains developer base.
Emerging players
- Replit Agent: Replit's autonomous agent builds full applications from natural language inside the Replit cloud IDE — a broader scope than Cline but increasingly overlapping as agents handle end-to-end software creation.
- Continue (Devin / Cognition): Cognition's Devin is an autonomous software engineering agent that handles end-to-end tasks (planning, coding, testing, deployment) — competing for the same enterprise agentic-coding narrative that Cline and LG CNS's 'Spec Driven for Enterprise' product targets.
- Aider: Aider is an open-source AI pair-programming tool that runs in the terminal with multi-file editing and Git integration — directly comparable to Cline CLI as an open-source, model-agnostic coding agent.
Market position
Strengths4 records
Weaknesses4 records
Competitive moat6 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Cline social profiles
Digital presenceCline financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Cline leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Cline funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds2 records
Investors5 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Cline M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Cline
What does Cline do?
Cline builds and distributes an open-source (Apache 2.0) AI coding agent that automates software creation tasks inside developer environments. Its products include the Cline IDE extension (VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Neovim), the Cline CLI for terminal/CI usage, the @cline/sdk TypeScript SDK for embedding the agent into third-party products, the Cline Kanban multi-agent orchestration layer, and the Cline Teams enterprise platform with SSO, RBAC, audit trails, and observability. Revenue comes from usage-credit subscriptions (when customers use Cline-provided API keys), per-seat Cline Teams enterprise subscriptions, and a $1M open source grant program.
Is Cline a public or private company?
Cline is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was Cline founded?
Cline was founded in 2024. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is Cline based?
Cline is headquartered in San Francisco, United States, in the North America region.
How does Cline make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Per-seat Subscription is the primary driver. The others are usage credit subscriptions, freemium / open-source distribution and enterprise contracts and add-ons.
Who are Cline's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Anysphere (Cursor), Claude Code (Anthropic), Codeium (Windsurf), Sourcegraph (Cody/Amp) and Tabnine. Broad incumbents are GitHub Copilot and JetBrains AI Assistant. Emerging players are Replit Agent, Continue (Devin / Cognition) and Aider.
Does Cline have an API?
Yes. Cline offers a public open-source TypeScript SDK (@cline/sdk) that exposes the company's agent runtime for embedding in third-party products. It also provides an Enterprise API for programmatic access to enterprise features. The SDK is a four-layer modular stack (shared utilities, provider gateway, browser-compatible stateless loop, and Node runtime) enabling session durability, multi-agent coordination, plugin extensibility, and multi-provider switching. SDK language: TypeScript. Developer documentation is at docs.cline.bot.
What industry is Cline in?
Cline's product category is AI Coding Agent / Developer Tools. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAEANAJ, AI Application Enablement Platforms (Copilot/Agent Frameworks, SDKs), with a secondary code of HDAEANAI, AI Integration & Orchestration Platforms (Connectors, Workflow, iPaaS for AI). Its NAICS code is 513210 and its SIC code is 7372.