Social coding player GitHub has raised US$100m in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital player which has also invested in Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and Skype. This is the largest single investment that Andreessen Horowitz has ever made and signifies the rise and rise of the software economy.
This is also the first external funding that GitHub has taken since it established itself in 2008.
GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects and is one of the worlds’ most popular open-source hosting sites. It has an Alexa rank of 352 and is known as the Wikipedia for coders.
As of September last year, GitHub had achieved more than 1m users.
‘Software is eating the world’
And until now the company has bootstrapped itself, which is largely unheard of in the high-octane world of Silicon Valley start-ups.
“Our company has been profitable for years, is growing fast, and doesn’t need money. So why bother?” CEO Tom Preston-Werner said in a blog post last night.
“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.”
Preston-Werners also said venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s observation that “software is eating the word” and the fact that Andreessen Horowitz has no interest in the status quo of the venture capital industry but rather the companies themselves, were factors.
“We want GitHub to be even easier for beginners and more powerful for experts. We want GitHub everywhere – whether you use Windows or Mac or Linux or some futuristic computer phone that hasn’t been invented yet – we want GitHub to be an awesome experience.
“We want to make it easier to work together than alone. We want to keep changing the way software is developed for the better by making collaborating easier and sharing a no-brainer,” Preston-Werner said.
Man using a laptop image via Shutterstock
