Helsinki-based GitHits has raised €1.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Vendep Capital, with participation from Trind VC and angel investors including Peter Sarlin, Zach Shelby, and Jerry Liu. The startup, spun out of Softlandia Venture Studio in late 2025, is building an AI-focused code search infrastructure aimed at improving how coding agents retrieve and use open-source examples and dependency-level context. The company develops what it describes as a version-aware index of public code to help AI systems reduce hallucinations by grounding outputs in real implementations rather than model-generated guesses. It plans to use the funding to launch its beta CLI product and continue development of its “code search for AI agents” platform ahead of a planned commercial release later this year.
AI hallucinates when writing code. A new startup founded by serial entrepreneurs is solving the problem by giving agents access to open-source code. GitHits is launching the beta version of its product today.
“Our vision is to index all public open-source code. With this funding, we are launching the beta version of the product today, and the first commercial version later this year,” says CEO Jaakko Timonen.
GitHits offers AI coding agents a set of tools for finding working examples of open-source implementations, and for inspecting software components, including dependencies and vulnerabilities. To enable that, GitHits is building an AI-native, version-aware index of all public open-source code.
“OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have left a gap in the market. GitHits doesn’t compete with Codex, Claude Code or Cursor, but complements them by bringing open-source code as context for agents to end retry loops and reduce token consumption,” says CTO Olli-Pekka Heinisuo.
Heinisuo has extensive experience in the open-source ecosystem. He previously developed opencv-python, a software package with more than 100 million downloads, which was also used by NASA in its Ingenuity helicopter that flew on Mars.
“Coding agents are great at navigating your local codebase. The problem is that modern software doesn’t stop at the repository boundary. A large part of the system lives in frameworks, libraries, SDKs, and other open-source dependencies. Agents can’t inspect those nearly as well, so AI has to guess, and it produces code that looks correct but doesn’t work in practice,” Heinisuo adds.
Competition in AI search is intense. US-based Exa raised a $250 million Series C in May at a $2.2 billion valuation to build search for AI agents. “Exa is building a general-purpose search for AI. GitHits focuses only on code,” says Heinisuo.
The idea for GitHits was born when Heinisuo was working at the AI consulting company Softlandia. For years, he had been frustrated by repeatedly giving colleagues the same tip when they could not find information related to open-source code. The tip was based on a manual search, and Heinisuo realized the problem could be solved with AI.
Heinisuo’s colleague Jaakko Timonen became excited about the idea, and the two set out to spin out a new company with Softlandia’s support. They assembled a team of four experienced co-founders and attracted investors.
“We’d been watching GitHits since it was just an idea, and what convinced us was the team that formed around it. Olli-Pekka is a quiet legend in open source and has lived inside this problem for years. At this stage you invest in people, and this was an easy call,” says Timo Felin, Partner at Vendep Capital.
Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/githits-raises-e1-5m-pre-seed/
