Github gets its first investment

Github is making a new step forward: for the first time since its foundation in 2008, the company receives investment. The administration of the free code repository announced on Monday an agreement to finance $ 100 million from the Andreessen Horowitz foundation for improving and expanding the platform, which has already become the industry standard for managing and searching for code on the network. The fund estimated the value of the company at 750 million US dollars.

Peter Levine, partner of the Andreessen Horowitz Foundation, will join the Github team. The funds will be used to hire additional employees and expand to new platforms, such as mobile devices. Github Executive Director Tom Presto-Werner expressed hope not only to develop new functions, but also to improve old, for example, web applications for various operating systems. It is planned to make Github convenient to the masses of customers, from enthusiasts to large companies, from software developers to designers and writers.
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In his blog post, Levin stressed that this was the largest investment the fund had ever made and explained why they decided to fund Github:

They feel the image of a new way of developing programs and created a new type of company to implement it. Not having a large number of people in sales and marketing, the four managed to grow into a company with more than 100 employees, and while the income grew by almost 300% per year, and the company paid for itself almost from the very beginning.

About 3 million repositories and 1.7 million developer users are registered on the Github website, co-founder and former executive director Chris Uostrat once even called it “Wikipedia for programmers”. According to company statistics , 80 thousand repositories are updated per day and 7 thousand users register their first repository. The open source Github software platform allows programmers to collaborate on projects without any additional effort, and read the code that others publish.

In March, Wanstraat explained the importance of the company's mission:

We have never received money from outside, we have achieved everything ourselves. Three months after going online, we started selling services, and all this time that Github was afloat, we were funded only by our customers. [...] We believe that the most important is to improve the quality of Github. It should be what people want to pay for, because they pay to continue our work on great products.

Preston-Werner, who took Wanstraat’s post a few weeks ago so that the first one could concentrate on leadership, and the second on development, said that the additional funds would not affect Github’s work, it is only planned to hire the best programmers to implement some ideas.

Earlier this year, the Andreessen Horowitz Foundation estimated the cost of Github at $ 500–800 million and expressed its intention to begin financing the project.