The VC community continues to invest heavily in open source, as over $150 million in new investments were announced yesterday in just three deals. That is a lot of money by anyone’s mark and signals that the investment community still thinks open source can lead to big profits. The three companies announcing new investments were:
1.) GitHub: The software repository has become the de facto standard for storing source code since it was founded in 2008 (with a tip of the hat to Sourceforge, which I still love and admire). Since 2008, VC firms have been trying to get a piece of the Hub, but its founders had resisted. Being profitable and having a who’s who of tech giants as customers can give you that kind of independence.
All of that ended yesterday, though, when GitHub announced that it has accepted a $100 million (that’s right, One Hundred Million Dollars) investment by famed Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz.