GitHub raises $100M of venture capital

GitHub, the code sharing site based around Linus Torvald's distributed version control system git, has announced that it has raised $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz venture capital. The investment is the largest single investment that Andreessen Horowitz (co-founded by Marc Andreessen, co-author of Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape, and Ben Horowitz, entrepreneur and investor) has made to date. It is also the first time that GitHub has taken external money since its founders bootstrapped the company in April 2008. The company says it has been profitable since then and has been growing revenue at a rate of around 300% per annum.

GitHub has taken Git and surrounded it with numerous integrated collaboration tools; the company offers free public repositories and charges businesses and individuals who want private repositories and collaboration tools. The model has made GitHub popular with many open source projects who use the site as their "home" on the internet. The company also offers "GitHub Enterprise", an on-premises version of its software for larger organisations to run on their private networks.

Tom Preston-Werner, a founder and current CEO of GitHub, explained that they found Marc Andreessen and Peter Leveine (another Andreessen Horowitz partner) had "no interest in the status quo of venture capital" and wanted to help company founders build great companies, especially in the field of software. Details of what the company plans to do with the new money are vague beyond "we want GitHub to be an awesome experience" and "we want to make it easier to work together than alone".

(djwm)