Former GitHub CEO raises record $60M to build platform for AI coding agents and human developers

Former GitHub CEO raises record $60M dev tool seed round at $300M valuation | TechCrunch

Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has raised the largest-ever seed round for a dev tool startup, according to its lead backer, Felicis. The startup, Entire, has raised $60 million at a $300 million valuation. Entire offers an open source tool to help developers better manage code written by AI agents. Entire's tech has three components. One is a git-compatible database to unify the AI-produced code. Git is a distributed version control system popular with enterprises and used by open source sites like GitHub and GitLab. Another component is what it calls "a universal semantic reasoning layer" intended to allow multiple AI agents to work together. The final piece is an AI-native user interface designed with agent-to-human collaboration in mind. The first product Entire is releasing is an open-source tool it calls Checkpoints that automatically pairs every bit of software the agent submits for use in a software project with the context that created it, including prompts and transcripts. The idea is to allow the human developer to review, search, and perhaps even learn from why the AI did what it did. Entire hopes to help developers better deal with the large volumes of software created by AI coding agents. Popular open-source projects are particularly overwhelmed these days with suggested code contributions that may or may not be AI slop -- meaning poorly designed and possibly unusable code. Dohmke explains in the press release: "We are living through an agent boom, and now massive volumes of code are being generated faster than any human could reasonably understand. The truth is, our manual system of software production -- from issues, to git repositories, to pull requests, to deployment -- was never designed for the era of AI in the first place." Dohmke was CEO of Microsoft's GitHub for four years, leaving in August 2025 to found a startup, he said in a post on X at the time. During his time there, he oversaw the rise of the popular coding agent GitHub Copilot. Other investors in the seed round include Madrona, M12, Basis Set, Harry Stebbings, Jerry Yang, and Datadog founder and CEO Olivier Pomel.

Former GitHub CEO Raises Funds for Startup to Sync AI and Human Code

Former GitHub Chief Executive Officer Thomas Dohmke has raised $60 million for a company that makes developer tools aiming to better merge the efforts of human programmers and AI coding applications. Called Entire, the startup is releasing its first product, which tracks and stores context from artificial intelligence coding agents, as an open source project on Tuesday. Dohmke announced in August that he'd be leaving Microsoft Corp.-owned GitHub. The round was led by Felicis Ventures, with investment from Madrona Venture Group and M12, Microsoft's venture arm, and values the company at $300 million. Other investors include Datadog Inc. CEO Olivier Pomel, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. The funding represents the largest ever seed round for a developer tools startup, Felicis said, citing PitchBook data. As increasing amounts of programming code are created by AI applications, tools are needed to better understand the apps' behavior, store data on why certain actions were taken and make it easier for people to collaborate with the AI products. The Entire platform will store such information in coding repositories. "That way you have code and context together, and then it allows you to do things like identifying the intent of that code, of that change, or just figuring out when was that code generated and with what prompt," Dohmke said in an interview. The first product, called Checkpoints, will integrate initially with Anthropic PBC's Claude and Google's Gemini -- with support for OpenAI and GitHub to follow likely within weeks. The company is initially targeting open source developers, AI-native companies and small startups, he said. "All the workflows that you imagined in your developer platform have to be reimagined," said S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona. "GitHub is a fantastic platform, but GitHub was built for an era where it was human beings doing all the work." Dohmke ended up at Microsoft in 2014 when it acquired his company, HockeyApp. Somasegar was Microsoft's developer tools chief at the time. GitHub has played a significant role in the last few years of generative AI development because its Copilot coding program, based on OpenAI's GPT-3, was the first product to really demonstrate that OpenAI's models could be widely adopted to generate new content -- in this case -- lines of software code. GitHub Copilot initially previewed in June 2021, and Dohmke was named CEO several months later, overseeing its public availability as well as the release of enterprise versions. GitHub, as well as other AI companies with coding tools like Anthropic and Cursor, are likely to be thinking about how to answer some of the same questions as Dohmke's new company, Somasegar said. "I think the world is large enough that I don't think it's all going to be one winner takes it all," he said.

Former GitHub CEO launches new developer platform with huge $60M seed round

Thomas Dohmke, who helped scale GitHub Copilot during his tenure as CEO at GitHub, is back with a new startup that's coming out of stealth with a hefty $60 million seed round. Silicon Valley venture firm Felicis, which led the round, called it the largest seed investment ever for a developer tools startup. Other backers include Seattle-based Madrona, Microsoft's VC arm M12, and Basis Set, along with individuals such as Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, and developer community voices such as Gergely Orosz and Theo Browne. Entire, valued at $300 million, is betting that existing developer tools aren't built for the rise of AI coding agents. Its platform is designed for teams that increasingly manage fleets of AI coding agents rather than writing every line themselves. Entire is shipping its first open-source project, a command-line tool called Checkpoints. The software records the reasoning and instructions behind AI-generated code and saves that information together with the code itself, so teams can see how and why changes were made. The goal is to make AI-written software easier to review and audit. Checkpoints is launching with support for Anthropic's Claude Code and Google's Gemini CLI, with plans to add other popular agents over time. "Just like when automotive companies replaced the traditional, craft-based production system with the moving assembly line, we must now reimagine the software development lifecycle for a world where machines are the primary producers of code," Dohmke said in a statement. "This is the purpose of Entire: to build the world's next developer platform, where agents and humans collaborate, learn and ship together." Entire enters an increasingly competitive market for AI coding tools, with companies such as Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Cursor, and others offering their own platforms and services. Dohmke moved from Germany to the United States after selling his startup HockeyApp to Microsoft in 2015. He took over as GitHub CEO in 2021, several years after its acquisition by Microsoft, and led the unit for nearly four years. Dohmke, who is based in Bellevue, Wash., left in August to work on Entire. Entire has 15 employees and operates as a fully remote company, with team members who previously built developer tools at GitHub and Atlassian. The startup plans to expand its headcount as it works toward a broader platform launch later this year.

Former GitHub CEO launches AI coding startup

Why it matters: Automated coding has been one of generative AI's earliest success stories, but it's also an increasingly crowded market with a flood of startups alongside big players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft. Driving the news: The new company, Entire, has raised $60 million in a seed round that values it at $300 million. * The round was led by Felicis, with Madrona, Microsoft's M12 and Basis Set also taking part. * Individual investors include Gergely Orosz, former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Y Combinator's Garry Tan. * Entire is also releasing its first product, Checkpoints, a developer tool that captures the context behind AI-written code, including the prompts, reasoning and decisions made by agents. What they're saying: "Entire is a new platform for developers in this era where agents write most of the code," Dohmke told Axios. "We are not training models or building agents, we are integrating with them." * Dohmke, who is CEO of Entire, stepped down from Microsoft-owned GitHub in August, saying he wanted to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors. Between the lines: Dohmke said his new venture isn't trying to compete directly with services like Claude Code, Curser or Codex. * "Our platform will be open-source, independent, and scalable for every developer and agent to host their code and agent context," he said. "If you build with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, you name it -- you will have a home with us."