GitHub Gets $100 Million from Andreessen Horowitz, the First Outside Investment

GitHub is well known outside of programmer circles and has become the premier code-hosting site out there, despite being just four and a half years old. Even more impressive, it did this while not taking any outside investment, just by pouring any money they got back into the company.

But that's all in the past, GitHub has now accepted a $100 million / €81 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, quite a chunk of money for a company that's been bootstrapped so far. In fact, it's the biggest single investment Andreessen Horowitz has made to date.

"Our company has been profitable for years, is growing fast, and doesn't need money. So why bother?," GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner writes.

"Because we want to be better. We want to build the best products. We want to solve harder problems. We want to make life easier for more people. The experience and resources of Andreessen Horowitz can help us do that," he mentions.

GitHub says all the money will be used to continue to grow at an even faster pace. It plans to hire more developers, expand into mobile and so on.

GitHub started out in 2008 as a (relatively) new way of developing software. It enabled developers to collaborate on projects while all the source code was stored in the cloud.

But beyond just being a software versioning system, it also added a social layer and fixed a major problem in existing solutions at the time by doing something very simple, group code by developers rather than projects.

The site has 1.7 million members contributing to some 3.185 million repositories. The numbers may not sound that impressive, but remember that most of these are developers actively using the site, not just regular users signing up on an impulse, like with many other sites or apps.

Via: GitHub Gets $100 Million from Andreessen Horowitz, the First Outside Investment