Germany’s Gitpod secures €25.5M, will build CDEs to help code from any device, anywhere

Germany-based Gitpod, an open-source development platform that builds ready-to-code workspaces in the cloud, announced on Thursday that it has secured $25M (approximately €25.5M) in a Series A round of funding led by Tom Preston-Werner (Founder GitHub) with the participation from existing investor General Catalyst.

Other investors, including Pebblebed, MongoDB Ventures, GTMfund, Tobi Lütke (CEO of Shopify), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), and Kent Beck (Signatory of the Agile Manifesto), also participated in the round. 

As a part of the funding, Preston-Werner and Juliet Bailin from General Catalyst will join Gitpod’s board of directors. 

The company says it will use the proceeds to create a new category – Cloud Development Environments (CDEs). The capital will also allow Gitpod to accelerate the development of automating the provisioning of ready-to-code, secure and collaborative workspaces for all professional software teams. The announcement comes over an year after raising €11M led by General Catalyst in April 2021.

Gitpod front-runs the shift to the cloud with CDEs, and companies such as Shopify, Stripe, and Slack are moving in the same direction.

“Developers have moved almost all creative workflows to the cloud. Yet, 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),” says Johannes Landgraf, co-founder, and CEO of 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.”

The company 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. 

Additionally, 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.

Gitpod: What you need to know

Gitpod is an open-source development platform for teams to efficiently and securely develop software. 

Gitpod’s Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) help developers to be always ready-to-code from any device, anywhere. 

Thanks to tool integration, the platform empowers developers to go with the flow, removing manual setup and maintenance of static and brittle local development environments. As a result, it saves up to 5 hours per engineer per week, claims the company. 

“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 folks will try writing because they are no longer afraid of wasting another four hours before giving up,” says Kent Beck, signatory of the Agile Manifesto and rediscoverer of Test Driven Development. “One of those programs that wouldn’t have been started will be exceedingly valuable.”

Gitpod intends to accelerate development with CDEs around the following areas:

• Performance and Security
• Integrations 
• Collaborations

“CDEs are a developer’s working environment which is their home for at least eight hours per day,” says Landgraf. “This is as close to the individual developer as you can and demonstrates the size of the opportunity 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.”

More than 750,000 developers use Gitpod – from open-source projects to high-growth companies and enterprises.