Ready-to-Code: Our Investment in Gitpod

Developers can iterate much faster today than ever before, largely because continuous integration and continuous delivery lowered the bar to ship new code significantly while not compromising on quality. But despite the innovation along the fabled DevOps pipeline, the one key component where developers spend most of their time hasn’t seen a ton of innovation: The development environment, where the actual code is written and locally tested before it’s committed into the pipeline.‍

Despite distributed development teams quickly growing in popularity, developers are still managing development environments on their local machines. They are largely keeping track of local build tools and settings manually and often spend their days waiting for tests or builds to complete instead of coding.

It’s about time one of the most efficiency-oriented workflows in the software development life cycle moves to the cloud. Bringing in massive benefits to individual developers and teams in productivity enhancement, additional security, ability to review code together, collaborative programming, and so on. The push towards remote work and ‘letting employees work from anywhere in the world’ is accelerating the move of source code away from individual machines towards cloud-native automated ready-to-code dev environments.

Gitpod to the rescue

Gitpod makes the tedious and time-consuming task of setting up and managing complex development environments go away. Gitpod delivers on the promise of development environments as code and offers a fully prebuilt, secure environment so individual developers and teams can be productive right away.

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.

— Sven Efftinge, Founder & CEO, Gitpod

Gitpod also just announced a partnership and native integration with GitLab, the 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.

“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 is a true open-source and community-powered solution. It spins up magically fast, can be self-hosted, and is the only vendor-independent solution that works with almost any cloud provider and code-hosting platform including GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket.

It’s All About the Team

Sven, Moritz, and Jan have been working together for more than ten years, before starting Gitpod. They are experts in developer tools, having created many popular open-source projects like Xtext, Theia, and Open-VSX alongside strong bottom-up communities. Gitpod just complemented their core team with Johannes who recently joined as Chief Commercial Officer (Hello again, Johannes!) and of course, they are hard at work adding more talent.

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.

— Sven Efftinge, Co-Founder and CEO of Gitpod.

We are thrilled at Speedinvest to back the Gitpod team, along with an incredible group of investors, Sandeep Bhadra at Vertex Ventures US, Krishna Visvanathan at Crane Venture Partners, who have deep expertise in developer tools and open-source. We look forward to the journey ahead to empower dev teams with automated ready-to-code dev environments so they can start working, collaborating on any project, any repo, any branch, any device, at any time, from anywhere!

For more, visit Gitpod (and follow them on Twitter), email me, find me on LinkedIn, or hit me up on Twitter.

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