GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced he will leave the company at the end of 2025 to start a new venture, more than a decade after moving from Germany to the United States following the sale of his startup to Microsoft.
“I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again,” Dohmke wrote in a statement. “I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organisation spread around the world.”
Dohmke said GitHub will continue under Microsoft’s CoreAI organisation, with more details to be shared later. He joined Microsoft after the acquisition of his startup, later helping lead the acquisition of GitHub alongside former CEO Nat Friedman before taking over the role himself.
Under his leadership, GitHub launched and expanded its AI coding assistant, Copilot, which now has more than 20 million users. “Because of your relentless work, GitHub Copilot has introduced the greatest change to software development since the advent of the personal computer,” he said.
The company also expanded globally, secured FedRAMP certification in the US, and introduced security and automation improvements, including GitHub Advanced Security and GitHub Actions. Dohmke said AI projects on the platform have doubled in the past year, with GitHub hosting over 1 billion repositories and 150 million developers.
“We only succeed when the world succeeds, too,” Dohmke said. “By launching this new age of developer AI, we’ve made it possible for anyone — no matter what language they speak at home or how fluent they are in programming — to take their spark of creativity and transform it into something real.”
