Today German startup Gitpod, one of the first open source developer platforms to automate the provisioning of ready-to-code development environments, today announced an approx. €2.5 million seed funding from Crane Venture Partners, Speedinvest, and Vertex Ventures US, as well as a partnership and native integration with GitLab, the DevOps platform delivered as a single application.
Founded in 2019, Gitpod streamlines developer workflows and helps teams become productive faster. The platform frees engineering teams from the friction of manually setting-up local dev environments, saving dozens of hours and enabling a new level of collaboration to create applications much more quickly than ever before.
“This is an exciting time in Gitpod’s history teaming up with experienced investors in the world of developer tools and open source software, as well as working together with GitLab to provide developers with critical cloud-based dev environment automation,” said Sven Efftinge, co-founder and CEO of Gitpod. “Gitpod’s first mover advantage and vibrant open-source community enables developers today to treat development environments as automated (yet customizable) resources they can spin up whenever they need them and close down and forget about when they are done with their task.”
Setting up and maintaining dev environments is tedious and requires lots of time. With Gitpod’s integration into GitLab, code reviews, bug fixes, building new features and exploring new projects is frictionless while increasing development productivity, efficiency and velocity. Developers can easily launch fresh dev environments for each new task directly from the GitLab interface via a new dropdown option from any project or merge request.
Gitpod is a true open source solution powered by the community, spins up magically fast, can be self-hosted and is the only solution that works with almost any cloud provider and code-hosting platform including GitLab, GitHub Enterprise, and Bitbucket.
“GitLab is excited to build a partnership with Gitpod,” said Brandon Jung, vice president of alliances at GitLab. “Gitpod’s expertise in automating cloud-based dev environments on GitLab combined with their focus on cloud native development workflows makes them a great fit for our customers helping enable them on their digital transformations.”
Gitpod’s new seed round was led by Speedinvest with participation from Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures US. Previously bootstrapped, this marks Gitpod’s first fund raise. The funding will be used to further refine the leading platform for development environment automation, as well as to expand Gitpod’s open source community and relevant ecosystem partnerships.
“As a developer, I am more than excited to team-up with Gitpod. Moving the last missing piece in the DevOps pipeline into the cloud is the logical next step to streamline software development,” said Dominik Tobschall, Principal at Speedinvest. “The push towards remote work will only accelerate this.”
“Gitpod’s developer-centric obsession has enabled them to build the best-of-breed technology in the rapidly growing market around dev environment automation. We are proud to back this exceptional team building a category defining company,” said Krishna Visvanathan, Co-Founder and Partner at Crane Venture Partners.
“Gitpod’s team has a track record of creating multiple open-source developer tools used by millions of engineers. With software engineering moving to remote but collaborative work, we see Gitpod securely allowing multiplayer mode for developers while saving VPs of Engineering hundreds of hours of tool setup-time. This will be an integral part of any professional software delivery pipeline,” said Sandeep Bhadra, Partner at Vertex Ventures US.