cto.new today launched from stealth with the first completely free AI coding agent. Founded by Simon Spurrier the startup also announced $5.7 million across pre-seed and seed rounds from Kindred Ventures, PROfounders Capital, Wonder Ventures, and Entrepreneurs First.
The company released a video you can watch here: https://youtu.be/97dXmTPG1l8
The democratization bet
A lot of core internet software started paid and then went mainstream as free or freemium: email, file storage, stock trading, team chat, docs and spreadsheets. That shift didn’t just cut costs; it changed adoption and usage. Teams standardize on what everyone can access. Cto.new wants to apply the same playbook to AI coding. The bet: if an agent that plans work and ships code is free, more teams will try it, learn it, and make it part of daily engineering, without arguing over seat counts.
Why this matters now
AI coding tools can be pricey and fragmented. Teams juggle models and plugins that don’t share context. Bills spike with usage. Cto.new goes the other way: keep the agent in the tools teams already use: Linear, Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Slack, and remove the price barrier. The company says more than 6,000 developers at Adobe, Docker, Twilio, and PwC use it today.
The company also points to public benchmarks where its outperforming established tools on Terminal Bench and SWE-bench. It runs multiple popular LLMs including OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and routes tasks across them.
Product snapshot
- Workflow-native. Hooks into issues, repos, and chat so the agent carries context across tickets, code, and reviews.
- Team-first. Built for shared backlogs and handoffs, not just single-file prompts.
- Benchmark-driven. Public leaderboard results used as a quality signal.
- Free access. Engine Labs calls cto.new “the first completely free AI code agent.” (Details on limits or enterprise tiers aren’t disclosed here.)
“Our mission is to empower engineering teams by integrating powerful AI agents into their everyday workflow, eliminating friction, and making the entire software development lifecycle dramatically more affordable,” said Simon Spurrier, founder and CEO of Engine Labs. “With a small team, we’re already outperforming the world’s biggest companies in benchmarks and we plan to continue building with that same intensity.”
“This is the right product at the right time,” said Steve Jang, founder and managing partner at Kindred Ventures. “As AI floods into developer tools, the winners will be the ones who go deep on integration, speed, and team workflows. This team has nailed all three.”
Bottom line
If cto.new is successful, it could flip the entire paradigm of AI coding. Just how Robinhood pressured the large brokerages to provide free stock trading, cto.new could force the industry toward affordable pricing. Developers can try now at https://cto.new/
