The dirty secret of AI coding tools is that they are most confident exactly when they should not be. An agent navigates your own repository well enough, because it can read it, and then it hits the boundary where the real software lives, the frameworks, libraries and SDKs it cannot inspect, and it does what a language model does when it runs out of facts: it guesses. It invents a function that sounds right, produces code that looks correct, and the code does not run. GitHits, spun out of the Finnish AI studio Softlandia in late 2025, just raised €1.5 million in pre-seed funding to sell those agents the one thing they are missing at that boundary, which is a map.

The product is a version-aware index of public open-source code, a search layer an agent can query to find real, working implementations and to inspect a dependency’s actual functions, its versions, and its known vulnerabilities, rather than hallucinate them. The “version-aware” part is the load-bearing detail. A library’s API changes between releases, and an agent that pulls a plausible-sounding answer from the wrong version produces a bug that is maddening precisely because the code is almost right. “GitHits doesn’t compete with Codex, Claude Code or Cursor,” said chief technology officer Olli-Pekka Heinisuo, “but complements them by bringing open-source code as context for agents to end retry loops and reduce token consumption.” That last clause is the unglamorous sales pitch, and the strongest one: fewer wasted retries and fewer burned tokens is a line item every company running coding agents at scale can read on its bill.

The founder is the credential

At pre-seed there is rarely a product to underwrite, so investors underwrite the person, and Heinisuo is an unusually clean fit for this particular problem. He built opencv-python, the Python packaging of the OpenCV computer-vision library, a package with more than 100 million downloads that NASA flew aboard its Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. A credential like that tends to end arguments about whether someone understands open-source software and how developers actually consume it, which is the entire domain GitHits is indexing. Vendep partner Timo Felin was explicit that this is what the cheque was for: “We’d been watching GitHits since it was just an idea, and what convinced us was the team.”

The round was led by Helsinki’s Vendep Capital with Estonia’s Trind and angels including Peter Sarlin, Zach Shelby and Jerry Liu, a Nordic-Baltic syndicate with real depth in developer tools and machine learning. The product is early in the most literal sense: a command-line beta shipped the day the funding was announced, which is roughly the maturity €1.5 million buys. The thesis underneath it, though, is sturdier than the stage. As more code gets written by agents rather than people, the bottleneck shifts from generation, which is increasingly solved, to grounding, making sure the generated code corresponds to software that actually exists and behaves the way the agent thinks it does. GitHits is a bet that grounding becomes its own infrastructure layer.

Focus, or a ceiling

The comparison GitHits invites, and the one that frames the risk, is Exa, the US search-for-AI company that raised a $250 million Series C at a $2.2 billion valuation. Exa is building general-purpose search for agents, the whole web; GitHits is building only the code half of that problem, from Helsinki, for a rounding error of the money. The optimistic reading is focus: that a search layer purpose-built for open-source code, by someone who has shipped foundational open-source code, beats a generalist tool that treats code as just another document type. The pessimistic reading is a ceiling: that “search for agents” is a winner-takes-most market, that the generalists will fold code search into their broader product, and that a €1.5 million head start in one vertical is not a moat.

A pre-seed round does not settle which reading is right, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What it buys is the chance to find out, with a credible founder, a real and growing problem, and a sales pitch that speaks directly to the cost line CFOs are already squinting at. The agents are going to keep writing code whether or not they know what they are calling. GitHits is betting the valuable thing, soon, will be the one that knows.