- GitHub reached over 150 million developers and 1 billion repositories under Thomas Dohmke’s leadership, with Copilot surpassing 20 million users.
- Thomas Dohmke was born in East Berlin in 1978, saw his first computer through a shop window at Alexanderplatz a year before the Wall fell, and taught himself to code on a Commodore 64.
- Dohmke co-founded HockeyApp in 2011, a mobile DevOps platform acquired by Microsoft in 2014 for an undisclosed sum.
- In February 2026, he launched Entire, raising a record $60 million seed round at a $300 million valuation to build developer tools for the age of AI agents.
In February 2026, Thomas Dohmke stepped out of stealth with Entire, a startup valued at $300 million before writing a single line of revenue. The $60 million seed round, led by Felicis, was the largest ever for a developer tools company. Investors included Microsoft’s M12 arm, Madrona, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel.
Six months earlier, Dohmke had walked away from running the world’s largest developer platform. GitHub had 150 million developers, 1 billion repositories, and a product — Copilot — that was reshaping how software gets written. Most CEOs would have stayed. Dohmke titled his farewell blog post “Auf Wiedersehen” and went back to building.
A Boy in Marzahn Who Saw a Computer Through Glass
Thomas Dohmke was born in 1978 in East Berlin, in the concrete high-rise district of Marzahn. The German Democratic Republic was still standing. The internet did not exist. Personal computers were rare, expensive, and mostly unavailable behind the Iron Curtain.
In 1988, at the age of ten, Dohmke pressed his face against the window of a shop at Alexanderplatz and saw a real computer for the first time. That moment stayed with him. A year later, the Berlin Wall fell, and the world Dohmke was born into ceased to exist overnight.
With reunification came access. He got his hands on a Commodore 64, then a 386 DX-40 PC, and started teaching himself to code. By the time he was a teenager, he was spending most of his waking hours programming. He started a small company while still in school.
From TU Berlin to DaimlerChrysler’s Engineering Labs
Dohmke studied computer engineering at the Technische Universität Berlin, graduating in 2003. He later earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Glasgow. His early career took him through the engineering divisions of DaimlerChrysler and Bosch, where he worked on advanced driver assistance systems — the kind of embedded software that keeps cars from crashing.
It was methodical, serious work. But Dohmke was a builder at heart, and the corporate engineering world moved too slowly for someone who had been shipping code since his teens.
HockeyApp: A Mobile DevOps Bet That Microsoft Bought
In 2011, Dohmke co-founded HockeyApp with Andreas Linde, Stefan Haubold, and Michael Simmons. The platform gave mobile developers something that barely existed at the time: a clean way to distribute beta builds, collect crash reports, and analyze test coverage across iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows.
”We built HockeyApp because mobile developers had no real DevOps pipeline. Every release was a pain point. We just wanted to make developers more productive.” — Thomas Dohmke
HockeyApp grew fast and caught Microsoft’s attention. In December 2014, Redmond acquired the company. Dohmke moved inside the machine, leading the mobile developer tools division. He managed the teams behind HockeyApp, Visual Studio App Center, Xamarin Test Cloud, CodePush, and Azure Notification Hubs. It was a crash course in operating at Microsoft scale — and it put him on the path to GitHub.
The Copilot Moment That Changed Everything
When Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, Dohmke was part of the team that helped run the deal alongside then-CEO Nat Friedman. In November 2021, Friedman stepped down, and Dohmke took the CEO seat.
The timing was extraordinary. OpenAI’s GPT-3 had just demonstrated that large language models could generate coherent code. GitHub had been experimenting with it since 2020, and the result was Copilot — an AI pair programmer that could autocomplete entire functions.
”When we first used the GPT-3 model to build GitHub Copilot back in 2020, my initial thoughts were ‘Holy shit — this is really amazing. I thought it could never put the parentheses in the right place.’” — Thomas Dohmke, Sequoia Capital podcast
Copilot launched in June 2022 and became the fastest-growing product in GitHub’s history. By the time Dohmke left, 20 million developers were using it daily. Eighty percent of new GitHub users adopted Copilot in their first week. AI-assisted coding had gone from novelty to default.
150 Million Developers and a German Goodbye
Under Dohmke’s leadership, GitHub crossed milestones that few platforms ever reach: 150 million developers, 1 billion repositories and forks, and a suite of AI tools — Copilot, Copilot Workspace, GitHub Models — that positioned the platform at the center of every serious conversation about the future of software.
On August 11, 2025, Dohmke published “Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub” — a farewell letter that was equal parts gratitude and restlessness. “After all this time, my startup roots have begun tugging on me,” he wrote. “I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again.”
GitHub was folded into Microsoft’s CoreAI division. Dohmke left with the platform stronger than it had ever been.
Entire: A $300 Million Bet on Agent-Era Developer Tools
Dohmke’s thesis for Entire is blunt: the tools developers use today were built for humans writing code, not for managing fleets of AI agents that produce it. Existing version control captures what changed in a file. It does not capture why — the prompts, decisions, and execution traces that led an AI agent to write a particular function.
”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.” — Thomas Dohmke
Entire’s first open-source product, Checkpoints, is a CLI tool that stores prompts, transcripts, tool calls, and constraints alongside git commits. The goal: make agent-generated code auditable, governable, and reproducible.
From Alexanderplatz to the Assembly Line of Code
Dohmke’s career reads like a compressed history of software itself — from embedded systems in German cars, to mobile DevOps, to the world’s largest code platform, to AI agents writing code autonomously. Each chapter built on the last. Each one required leaving something behind.
He once said that every time he lands at Berlin’s airport, hearing the local dialect brings back flashes of his old life. The kid from Marzahn who stared at a computer through glass is now building the infrastructure for a world where machines write most of the software. The tools change. The instinct to build does not.
