Git repository hosting service GitHub raises a $250M round

The company, which has 10 million registered users, is now said to be valued at $2 billion

Git repository hosting service GitHub has just raised a $250 million round of funding, the company has confirmed to VatorNews. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Thrive Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and previous investor Andreessen Horowitz.

Founded in 2008, the GitHub was bootstrapped until 2012 when it raised a $100 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel. This latest round brings its total to $350 million in venture capital.

The company would not comment on its current valuation but the Wall Street Journal, which first reported this latest fund raising, has it pegged at $2 billion. 

GitHub offers distributed revision control and source code management functionality of Git.  Developers use it to communicate with each other while organizing programming projects. It acts as a way to store, and share, code.

Its products include GitHub Enterprise, which  can be deployed and managed on a team’s choice of infrastructure; Atom Text Editor, which is a hackable text editor; and GitHub Pages, which provides websites hosted directly from a GitHub repository.

The collaborative features of the GitHub platform, along with its desktop apps, and GitHub Enterprise, make it easier for individuals, as well as, teams to write better code. Enterprise customers include SAP, NASA, Braintree and CyberAgent. 

The service has proven to be extremely popular. With more than 33 million unique visitors using the service every single month, GitHub is now one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. It has over 10 million registered users and over 25 million repositories. It had only 1.7 million developers, and around 3 million software repositories, back in 2012.

Headquartered in San Francisco, and with fffices in Boulder, Colorodo and Tokyo, GitHub currently has over 300 total employees. It will be using this funding, in part, to continue expanding overseas. 

"This investment will accelerate GitHub’s vision of empowering developers everywhere to build great software, and help us continue our expansion into the enterprise and new geographies," a spokesperon for GitHub told me.

As popular as GitHub is, it may soon have some competition. GitLab is a company that, like GitHub, offers access to Git repositories, but with one major difference: it makes the software open-sourced.

"It's similar in a sense that both let you manage your code," Sytse “Sid” Sijbrandij, Founder and CEO of GitLab, told VatorNews when it raised a $1.5 million funding round earlier this month. "What makes us different is that this is an open-source software so anyone can contribute."

(Image source: github.com)