Confirmed: GitHub lands $250 million in funding and is now worth $2 billion

GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath

(Flickr/by DaveFayram) GitHub co-founder, CEO Chris Wanstrath

GitHub, the hugely popular and sometimes controversial website for hosting software development, has officially raised its second round of funding. Just like the first it's a whopper: $250 million, which now values the company at $2 billion, GitHub told the Wall Street Journal.

The company confirmed the round to Business Insider, telling us it was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Institutional Venture Partners.

This isn't a total surprise. News of the massive round leaked about a month ago.

Still, its another financial feather in GitHub's cap.

Back in 2012, Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) invested $100 million in GitHub, a record-breaker at the time, the largest individual investment A16z had ever made.

GitHub had been bootstrapped from a tiny startup to a profitable company. The founders didn't need the money and agonized over taking it, they told Business Insider at the time.

The company offers a service that hosts open-source software development projects.

Open source software allows anybody to use the software, make changes and share the changes with others. GitHub organizes all of that collaboration. Its main website is free to use, but it sells private versions of the GitHub platform to enterprises. They use it to manage their own software development projects.

GitHub is like a LinkedIn for software developers. Those who create or contribute to popular projects earn cred with others in the field. Employers look at it when hiring.

The company has had its share of rocky moments, including accusations in 2014 by one of its female developers that she was harassed. An internal investigation found she wasn't but the incident snowballed until co-founder CEO Tom Preston-Werner resigned and his wife wrote a public apology. Co-founder Chris Wanstrath took over as CEO.

In March it was attacked by hackers, reportedly from China who were said to be trying to shut down anti-censorship software hosted on the site.

Wanstrath told the WSJ that GitHub will use the funds to "make really big investments" like expanding internationally and supporting millions more software programmers and their projects.

GitHub has 300 employees and 33 million people use GitHub every month. It has 10+ million registered users and hosts 25+ million software projects.

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