Founders: Chris Wanstrath (CEO), PJ Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner
Launched: 2008
Funding: $350 million
Valuation: $1.5 billion (PitchBook)
Disrupting: Business services, consulting, IT
Rival: Google code
George Kavallines
GitHub has been described as the "Facebook for developers" because it encourages collaboration and interaction around code. The San Francisco-based company is a cloud service that developers use to build software projects, share them and work on them collaboratively in teams. GitHub is used by individual developers, organizations such as NASA, and enterprise customers including IBM, Target, Wal-Mart and John Deere. The company claims that 19 million developers use the service worldwide.
Read More FULL LIST: 2017 DISRUPTOR 50
GitHub has not been without its ups and downs. Though it's managed to attract $350 million in funding, including a $250 million round led by Sequoia Capital in 2015, the company has been criticized for sloppy spending and heavy losses under the leadership of co-founder and CEO Chris Wanstrath.
According to Bloomberg, GitHub had losses of $66 million for the first nine months of 2016 on revenue of $98 million for the same three quarters. This year looks to be better, analysts predict, but there's still no word on when, or if, the company will go public.
