In this decade, software development will fundamentally transform and eliminate all friction between imagination and creation. Initially, there will only be few companies who adopt this at scale. Their ability to automate across the entire software development lifecycle while maintaining enterprise-grade security and performance will determine their success. They will attract developers who refuse to waste time and work on what matters. They will create powerful economic engines. They will become the force of change, not its target.

At Gitpod, we give ambitious engineering organizations the building blocks to automate software development, starting with where both developers and AI engineers spend the majority of their time: in development environments.

Building on top of a repeatable go-to-market engine

After pioneering cloud development environments and winning hearts and minds of 1.5m developers, we found product-market fit with AWS-first engineering organizations in regulated industries (i.e. finance, pharma, healthcare, transportation) with > 200 developers and a clear developer productivity mandate.

Today, our value proposition centers on:

Enterprise revenue quadrupled in 2024 ending the year with three consecutive record quarters. Customers include, amongst others, one of the largest pharma companies ($1.6m), one of the largest alternative asset managers ($1.2m), one of the largest healthcare software players, a top 5 sovereign wealth fund, a leading educational publisher. We are in or past proof of value (>75% win rate) with another top 5 sovereign wealth fund, two of the largest US banks, a leading UK insurance company and have a CFO-approved $40m deal with one of AWS largest European customers. 54% of logos and 72% of pipeline are from Enterprises with similar shares of US and EMEA opps. Activated enterprise users grew 307% from April to Dec 2024 with users spending 38.9 hours per week in the product.

In 2024, we found repeatability and architecturally and culturally embraced a top-down, strategic, C-level sell to the enterprise. In 2025, we amp up our ambition.

Structural position to power trusted AI engineers

In the next 18 months, agents will transform software development beyond simple in-editor autocomplete into sophisticated, context-aware systems working on tasks end to end. Development teams will automate 80% of routine tasks, allowing engineers to focus on strategic and creative work. Intelligence and reasoning improvements in foundation models (most recently Sonnet 3.5 o3) drive this transformation — not deterministic scaffolding. Building a state-of-the-art PR review agent internally took us one day.

As models rapidly improve in early 2025, the bottleneck of wide scale enterprise adoption for AI engineers shifts from model intelligence to packaging and infrastructure. Building end-to-end platforms for the enterprise - not wrapping models - presents the true engineering challenge leading to defensibility.

The winning company will reimagine the interaction between software creators and agents outside of the IDE, forward deploy secure systems within enterprise VPCs, orchestrate standardized API-first environments at the operating system level, integrate with existing development infrastructure, and provide enterprise-grade oversight. These systems authenticate seamlessly with source control, registries, secret managers and editors while monitoring every keystroke setting security and compliance guardrails. Gitpod has spent the past 5 years building out the foundational primitives for this.

“The value of what Gitpod is building will grow exponentially. For developers, they can still work without it. For agents, it’s existential. You can’t run agents without a system like the one you’re building.”

Just as training models requires clean data, trusted AI engineers need standardized development infrastructure before they can join the workforce. We are structurally positioned to win this race and become the enterprise developer platform for human and AI engineers in software development.

Automating the Software Development Lifecycle

SONIC is our enterprise-first architecture for automated software development. It features four layers with built-in security and observability controls. The Interaction Surface enables human-agent collaboration. Cross-cutting Observability and runtime security enforce enterprise guardrails. The Network layer provides identity aware security groups and access controls. The Integration layer connects with existing tools and infrastructure, while the Compute layer provides isolated API-first environments powering both dev and continuous integration. SONIC delivers the foundation for AI-driven development automation at scale.

SONIC (Surface, Observability, Network, Integration, Compute)

SONIC (Surface, Observability, Network, Integration, Compute)


SONIC technical deep dive

The compute layer is foundational and provides secure access to compute resources, with the right tools installed and set up. Our runner architecture and surrounding SDK allows us to provide consistently high quality at pace. We currently support AWS EC2 and macOS (using the Apple virtualization framework), with Linux support coming in January and Azure, GCP on the roadmap. Setting up a runner in customer’s infrastructure takes less than five minutes. We are betting on devcontainer as the emerging standard for specifying development environment setup, and provide a highly optimized devcontainer experience.