Founders: Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner
Launched: 2008
Funding: $350.5 million
Valuation: $2 billion
Disrupting: Business services, consulting, IT
Rival: Google code
Source: Github
Chris Wanstrath, co-founder and CEO of GitHub
GitHub is a cloud service that programmers use to store their software projects, share them and work on them collaboratively in teams. The company's technology is used by individual developers and small start-ups, all the way up to large companies, like Apple, Google and Walmart, and it claims 15 million registered users.
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In April the open-source software company, based in San Francisco, announced that it's now storing projects using a system called DGit — short for Distributed Git — that ensures that data sits in many places, not just one, meaning the central repository is stored on three machines, not just one. If one or two of the machines goes down, the information is still available as the system rebuilds.
"We launched a private beta in February 2008 and already had tens of thousands of users by the time we launched officially in April 2008. Eight years later we have more than 15 million people collaborating on 38 million software projects on GitHub."
