Open source development platform used by more than 750,000 developers introduces Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) to solve the ‘works on my machine’ problem
Gitpod, the first open source development platform that builds ready-to-code workspaces in the cloud, today announced a $25m Series A. The funding will be used to create a new category – Cloud Development Environments (CDEs). The Series A allows Gitpod to accelerate innovation for its open platform that automates the provisioning of ready-to-code, secure and collaborative workspaces for all professional software teams. Gitpod front-runs the shift to the cloud with CDEs and companies such as Shopify, Stripe and Slack are moving in the same direction.
“CDEs are a developer’s working environment which is their home for at least eight hours per day”
Tom Preston-Werner, founder and former CEO at GitHub, leads the round making this his largest investment in a private company. Preston-Werner and Juliet Bailin from General Catalyst will join Gitpod’s board of directors. All existing investors including General Catalyst, Crane Venture Partners, Vertex Ventures US and Speedinvest are participating. Other notable investors include Pebblebed; GTMfund; MongoDB Ventures; Tobi Lütke, founder and CEO, Shopify and Olivier Pomel, founder and CEO, Datadog and Kent Beck, signatory of the Agile Manifesto. Gitpod also announced the extension of its leadership with Mike Brevoort as Head of Product; Matthew Du Pont, Head of Sales and Sara Parker, Head of Customer Success. Co-founder Johannes Landgraf joins the board and becomes the company’s single CEO, and co-founder Sven Efftinge returns to an individual contributor role as Gitpod’s first Technical Fellow.
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“Developers have moved almost all creative workflows to the cloud. Paradoxically, the workflow of writing software itself never left local computers. Gitpod’s purpose is to change that. With the additional funding we will continue to spearhead the shift to the cloud for developers: from static and brittle development environments to consistently reproducible, instant, ephemeral Cloud Development Environments (CDEs),” said Johannes Landgraf, co-founder and CEO, Gitpod. “Tom joining our board and leading the round with his largest investment to date makes us proud and is a strong vote of confidence in our ability to build a lasting company that makes creating software more collaborative, joyful and secure.”
“I am a power user of the platform myself, and am convinced Gitpod is on its way to change how the world writes software. The direction of travel is set and a massive company will be built around Cloud Development Environments (CDEs),” said Tom Preston-Werner, founder of Preston-Werner Ventures, GitHub founder and former CEO. “I am excited to join their board and help build a company that will have a similar impact on the lives of developers as GitHub did.”
The future of writing software happens in CDEs. Developing software in the cloud is not about simply replicating an existing local workflow to a computer that happens to run remotely in a datacenter. The ‘works on my machine’ problem continues to exist – it just moves from a local computer to a computer in the cloud. Long-lived development environments are stateful and brittle, wasting countless hours due to drifting configuration within software teams. The true opportunity is to remove friction and improve the developer experience with the automation, collaboration and security benefits provided by the cloud. This is what developer environments are all about.
CDEs improve the productivity of companies’ most scarce and expensive employees: developers. Gitpod customers reference up to five hours per week per engineer of time wasted due to broken development environments. A recent poll from the co-creator of Django surfaced similar numbers.
“The first advantage of Cloud Development Environments for developers is the time they save. I’ve seen different numbers for the current cost of keeping a development environment working, but it’s certainly tens of percent of working time. More important, will be all the programs that folks will try writing because they are no longer afraid of wasting another four hours before giving up,” said Kent Beck, signatory of the Agile Manifesto and rediscoverer of Test Driven Development. “One of those programs that wouldn’t have been started will turn out to be exceedingly valuable.”
“Gitpod is the most exciting developer tool I have encountered since, I don’t know, telnet maybe? Unix? It’s been a while,” said Keith Adams, investor and former Chief Architect, Slack.
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Building Cloud Development Environments (CDEs)
The new influx of capital will enable the company to accelerate its leading position in the category. Gitpod will continue to drive forward the boundaries of innovation to further imagine what’s possible with CDEs around the following areas:
- Performance and Security – CDEs should be available in an instant – seemingly infinite and secure. Customers trust Gitpod with their code, their data and their time. With this comes a great responsibility. This week the company announced their SOC2 Type II audit. Roadmap items include dramatically faster startup times, improved resiliency and a new Gitpod Cloud offering for larger companies.
- Integrations – Gitpod is a next-generation developer experience platform, empowering developers to seamlessly assemble all of the resources they need, just in time. The company is fostering a community of partners to create an ecosystem around better templates, plugins, provisioning and integrations. Roadmap items include a workspace plugin system, APIs, and increased extensibility.
- Collaboration – software development teams collaborate across time, team and roles. CDEs will create entirely new opportunities for team members to work more closely together. Roadmap items include preview environments and new collaborative workflows.
“CDEs are a developer’s working environment which is their home for at least eight hours per day,” said Landgraf. “This is as close to the individual developer as you can get and demonstrates the size of the opportunity that we are tackling. We want to build a lasting company on top of a paradigm shift that will change how the world writes software – for the better.”
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