GitHub Revenue: $2B ARR in 2024, and How Copilot Got It There

GitHub's annual revenue run rate reached $2 billion, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told investors on the company's fiscal 2025 first-quarter earnings call in October 2024. That is double the $1 billion in annual recurring revenue Nadella disclosed on the October 2022 earnings call, and it makes GitHub roughly seven to ten times the size it was when Microsoft bought it for $7.5 billion in 2018 — contemporaneous press reports put ARR at the time of the deal in the $200 million to $300 million range.

The growth engine is not subscriptions to code hosting. On that same October 2024 call, Nadella said GitHub Copilot, the company's AI pair programmer, accounted for over 40% of GitHub's revenue growth for the year — and that Copilot on its own was already a bigger business than all of GitHub at acquisition.

What is GitHub's revenue?

GitHub does not file its own financials — since October 2018 it has been a Microsoft subsidiary, and Microsoft folds it into the Intelligent Cloud segment without a standalone line item. Every reliable revenue figure therefore comes from a dated executive disclosure or from reporting around the acquisition. Here is what can actually be pinned down:

ARR (annual recurring revenue) and "annual revenue run rate" annualize the most recent period rather than reporting a trailing twelve months, so these figures run slightly ahead of what a fiscal-year income statement would show.

How GitHub makes money

GitHub's model is freemium subscriptions layered with usage-based and AI products:

• Free and paid plans for code hosting. Team runs $4 per user per month and Enterprise $21 per user per month on current published pricing. GitHub Enterprise, the self-hosted product for large companies, launched back in 2011 — seven years before the Microsoft deal, not alongside it.
• GitHub Copilot, in technical preview from June 2021 and generally available to individual developers in June 2022 at $10 per month, with a business tier at $19 per user per month reaching general availability in February 2023. By January 2024, Nadella told investors Copilot had 1.3 million paid subscribers across more than 50,000 organizations, up 30% quarter over quarter.
• Usage-billed compute: GitHub Actions (CI/CD, launched in 2019 — after the acquisition, not before it) and Codespaces bill by the minute beyond free allowances.
• GitHub Marketplace, where third-party developer tools are sold, with GitHub taking a share.

The user base underneath all of this: GitHub announced it had passed 100 million developers in January 2023, two years ahead of the 2025 target it had set publicly, and says 90% of the Fortune 100 use the platform.

The $7.5 billion Microsoft acquisition, in context

Microsoft announced the all-stock acquisition on June 4, 2018 and closed it that October. Against the $200 million to $300 million in ARR reported at the time, $7.5 billion was a multiple of roughly 25 to 37 times revenue — a price that looked aggressive in 2018 and considerably less so now that GitHub generates $2 billion a year and anchors Microsoft's AI developer story.

Microsoft installed Nat Friedman as CEO at close. Thomas Dohmke, a former startup founder who joined Microsoft in 2014 and moved to GitHub after the deal, succeeded him in November 2021 and presided over the Copilot ramp. In August 2025, Dohmke announced he was leaving to found a startup, and GitHub's leadership was folded into Microsoft's CoreAI engineering organization — a signal of how central the Copilot business has become to the parent company.

Funding history: two rounds, $350 million, then the exit

GitHub raised exactly two rounds before the acquisition — not three, as this article previously claimed:

Before 2012, founders Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett bootstrapped the company from its 2008 launch — four years of profitability on paid private repositories before taking outside money. The 2012 Series A was widely reported as Andreessen Horowitz's largest single check to that point, and the 2015 Series B valued GitHub at about $2 billion, per reporting at the time. Microsoft's 2018 price was therefore roughly 3.75x the last private valuation, three years later.

Where the numbers get fuzzy

An earlier version of this article carried figures we can no longer stand behind, so they are gone: a claim that GitHub Actions contributes "$200 million+" to revenue (no source has ever broken out Actions revenue), a year-by-year revenue timeline that cannot be sourced year by year, and quotes attributed to a misspelled "Thomas Domke." What remains above is only what a named person said on a dated record, or what the GetLatka database estimates — labeled as such.

The honest summary: GitHub's revenue is $2 billion a year as of October 2024 by Microsoft's own telling, it doubled in roughly two years, and the doubling is mostly Copilot. Anything more precise than that is modeling, not disclosure.