GitHub under Microsoft: 90M active users, $1B ARR while keeping its “original form”

Microsoft has made a lot of business acquisitions, and many of them have proved to be incredibly beneficial for the tech giant. The biggest among them is GitHub, which received a great deal of appreciation in its earnings call after being able to reach an annual recurring revenue of $1 billion.

Microsoft acquired the software developer-focused web-based version-control and collaboration platform for $7.5 billion in June 2018. At that time, it was only able to hit $200 to $300 million in revenue with around 28 million active users. Now, there is a huge development in the GitHub community, which finally gained 90 million active users and growing revenue.

“Since our acquisition, GitHub is now at $1 billion annual recurring revenue and GitHub’s developer-first ethos has never been stronger,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. “More than 90 million people now use the service to build software for any cloud, on any platform — up three times.”

Nonetheless, despite these huge achievements, it is important to note that GitHub hasn’t changed much in terms of the free service access it is offering. Before the acquisition, that was the fear of many users, but instead of using the hosting service to gain back quickly the money it spent, Microsoft decided to preserve its original nature as a free online software development platform. It also opted to improve the site by adding CI/CD tools, security tools, GitHub Actions, Codespaces, and more. Now, it is reaping what it sowed.

“Microsoft has not forgotten why we did the deal in the first place and what the important pillars of the deal are,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said in a statement to TechCrunch, expressing his appreciation for how GitHub stays in its “original form” even after the acquisition. “The first and foremost principle is to put developers first. And that is what we do every day,”