Next Chapter for Gitpod

At Gitpod our focus has always been to remove all friction from the developer experience and empower developers to be always ready-to-code. Today we are excited to announce a $13m funding round led by General Catalyst, a fully revamped visual & brand identity as well as several product milestones aimed at defining a new product category in modern software development.

Funding

We did not need to raise money and actually did not plan for it. We reconsidered when Steve Herrod reached out last November. The first thing he mentioned during our inital call was that he spent the night before configuring and automating his Python environment with Gitpod and was blown away by the automation possibilities. His experience and personality are a 100% match with Gitpod and we feel great adding him as our first external board member. Steve and General Catalyst on our side let us accelerate our roadmap and continue to build out a fully-distributed world class team (we’re hiring) to move software development to the cloud. Next to General Catalyst all of our early backers participated in the round including Speedinvest, Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. Thank you for your continous support 🙌

Brand

We believe there are standards to be set when it comes to establishing brands in developer tooling. Over the last 2 months we set out to institutionalise design as a key part of the company and will continue to work closely together with our friends at MAD as well as Vic - giving our visual identity a style & feel that is on par with our backend architecture. What we launch today is a back to basics approach where we present a complex, feature-rich developer tool in a clear and simple way. On the way we also learned about kumquats! 🍊

Product

Product is at the core of everything we do. We believe that by 2023 ephemeral cloud-based development environments will be as common as CI/CD is today. With our new product updates we take a big step towards realizing that vision. Starting today we willl switch to VS Code as the default editing experience in Gitpod. We are also announcing general availability of sudo privileges and Docker support allowing developers to build Docker images and run containers within their Gitpod workspace. This is based on advanced namespace layering technology and a great collaborative effort with our friends from Kinvolk. Lastly, we completely rebuilt the dashboard frontend to speed-up developers’ workflows and bring our UX and UI to 2021 ✨

Conference

We build Gitpod to improve the daily experience of devs when trying to get the job done. Developers should focus on what really matters: being creative and writing code. Instead they borrow time from their primary task to manually do what could be automated, fight accidental complexity, or get surprised by poorly designed tools, APIs, and programming languages. Today we publicly announce DevX Conf (28-29 April) to start from first principles, collaborate, listen, discuss and declutter our workflows, toolchains and minds. We want to spark dialogue across the areas of coding, testing, building, deploying, collaborating on and running software. Speakers include Jason Warner (CTO Github), Beyang Liu (CTO Sourcegraph), Josh Long (Spring), Shanea Leven (Founder Codesee), Ellen Chisa (Founder Darklang), Henry Zhu (Steward of BabelJS), Maël Nison (Creator Yarn), Nader Dabit (GraphQL & Serverless), Anurag Goel (Founder Render), Yihong Cheng (Github1s), Tuomas Artman (Founder Linear) and many more. Hope to see you there!