KIEL, Germany, Oct. 08, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gitpod, the first open source developer platform to automate the provisioning of ready-to-code development environments, today announced $3M USD 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. Gitpod is an open source GitOps solution that leverages the version control system as the canonical source of truth to automate everything a developer needs to start coding. Gitpod 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 them 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 $3M USD 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.

Gitpod is available today as an open source solution free to any developer seamlessly integrating with different cloud-providers and git-hosting-platforms. Visit https://www.gitpod.io/docs/gitlab-integration/ for more information about Gitpod’s native integration on GitLab or email contact@gitpod.io.

About Gitpod
The team at Gitpod.io is driven to enable all professional development teams to immediately start working and collaborating in a fully prebuilt, secure dev environments on any project, any branch and any device. Gitpod invented the notion of prebuilds allowing developers to describe dev environments as code and get an immediately productive development environment for any GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket project. The company is founded by experienced developer tools experts that worked together for 10+ years creating programming languages and growing open source communities (Xtext, Theia). Gitpod operates a flight-proven product and leads the pack of fully-functional Cloud Dev Environments with more than 250k registered developers. www.gitpod.io

About Crane
Crane is a London-based VC firm focused on early-stage investments in European start-ups that are solving real problems for the enterprise and enterprise workers. We back ambitious founders building category defining companies who are redefining the enterprise stack. Crane’s portfolio includes 7Bridges, Axiom, Foundries, Harbr, Onfido, Shipamax, Tessian and Virtuoso. www.crane.vc

About Speedinvest
Speedinvest is a European venture capital fund with €400M+ AUM and more than 40 investment professionals working from Berlin, London, Munich, Paris, Vienna and San Francisco. Employing a sector-focused investment structure, we fund innovative early-stage technology startups in the areas of Fintech, Digital Health, Consumer Tech, Network Effects, Deep Tech and Industrial Tech. Speedinvest actively deploys its global network and dedicated team of in-house operational experts to support our 150+ portfolio companies, including with US market expansion. Learn more: www.speedinvest.com

About Vertex Ventures US
Vertex US is an early-stage venture capital firm that backs companies transforming industries through software and data. With investments including LaunchDarkly, PerimeterX, and Desktop Metal, Vertex US brings pioneering experience to pioneering enterprises. In Sik Rhee and Jonathan Heiliger co-founded Vertex US in 2015. For more information, visit vertexventures.com.

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Media Contact:
Nichols Communications for Gitpod
Ray George
ray@nicholscomm.com
+1 650-922-3825