Geeks Rejoice. GitHub raises $100 million

The company will use the Andreessen Horowitz investment to make GitHub work for everyone involved in software development.

Programmers love GitHub, an online tool for organizing development projects and communicating about them. And now GitHub-the-company, which has been bootstrapped so far, is getting a $100 million input. GitHub is the online interface for Git, a web based tool for managing software development. Git was created by Linus Torvalds.

GitHub was designed to organize open-source projects but can be used for all types of projects. The service is free for open-source users, but makes money by selling licenses for commercial, enterprise and corporate use. The company reports that there are more than 3 million software repositories hosted on GitHub, and that it's used by 1.7 million developers.

Peter Levine, fA/H partner and ormer CEO of XenSource, will join the GitHub board. Asked why his venture firm is pumping so much money into a startup that has been self-sustaining to date, Levine says, "The very nature of what GitHub is doing, social coding, will accelerate the development of mobile apps, on-premises apps, backend or enterprise services, whatever. It breaks down the silos within corporations and between partners." Levine says that as developers build more online and mobile apps that work together they need greater communication and shared codebases.

What will the bootstrapped company do with its overflowing bank balance? Neither Levine nor Preston-Werner would lay out their plans, but with that balance, acquisitions are a definite possibility. The CEO added that the funds "will help us build GitHub everywhere. It should work for students, up to users in gigantic enterprises, and across all platforms. Wherever you're developing, it should be there for you -- on Linux, a Mac, Windows, and on mobile, to check on the social aspects of a project." Preston-Werner adds that he's interested in "the third dimension: working across professions." GitHub may release specific tools for designers and technical writers, for example. His goal is to make the system useful for "anyone working around software." While GitHub has "been talking to VCs since the early days," Preston-Werner says the potential relationships "never really felt right" until the deal with Andreessen-Horowitz.