New Delhi: GitHub’s CEO, Thomas Dohmke, announced on Monday that he will step down at the end of 2025 to start a new company. GitHub is owned by Microsoft, which bought it in 2018 for USD 7.5 billion.
Dohmke, originally from Germany, moved to the U.S. after selling his earlier startup to Microsoft more than 10 years ago. He said he misses the excitement of building something new and wants to return to his “startup roots.” He has not revealed details about his new company.
Before becoming CEO in 2021, Dohmke worked on mobile developer tools at Microsoft and played a major role in the GitHub acquisition.
Today, GitHub serves over 150 million developers and hosts more than 1 billion code repositories. Under Dohmke’s leadership, the company:
Got U.S. government approval (FedRAMP certification) to be used in federal projects.
Expanded to the European Union and Australia.
Made the platform faster, more reliable, and more accessible.
Saw AI-related projects on GitHub double in the past year.
Grew GitHub Actions (its automated coding tool) to run 3 billion minutes every month — up 64% from last year.
Dohmke also led the growth of GitHub Copilot from a simple AI code-completion tool to a full coding assistant with chat, voice, and code review features. Copilot now has over 20 million users and uses AI models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.
In his farewell message, he said:
“We’ve entered a new era of AI for developers — now, anyone, no matter their native language or coding skills, can turn their ideas into real projects.”
After Dohmke leaves, GitHub will remain part of Microsoft’s CoreAI division, and leadership changes will be announced later.
When Dohmke visited India last year, he said more than 15.4 million Indian developers actively use GitHub — a number growing by 33 percent every year. He predicted that by 2027, India will have more developers on GitHub than the U.S., becoming the largest developer community in the world.
Leave a Reply