Two GitHub Alumni Are Rebuilding Developer Tools for the AI Era
Within weeks of each other in early 2026, two of the most prominent people to ever leave GitHub announced massive funding rounds for their new developer tool startups. Scott Chacon, one of GitHub's four original co-founders, raised $17M from Andreessen Horowitz for GitButler — a reimagined Git client built for AI-era workflows. And Thomas Dohmke, GitHub's CEO from 2021 to 2025, raised $60M in a record-breaking seed round for Entire — a platform to help developers understand and govern AI-written code.
They both left the world's largest code platform. They're both betting that the rise of AI coding agents breaks everything developers rely on. And despite working on adjacent problems, they're not really competing with each other.
Here's the full picture.
The GitHub connection
GitHub was founded in October 2007 by four people who met in the San Francisco Ruby community: Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, P.J. Hyett, and Scott Chacon. It launched publicly on April 10, 2008, grew from a bootstrapped side project to 450 employees, and was acquired by Microsoft in June 2018 for $7.5 billion.
Thomas Dohmke was not one of those four founders — a distinction worth making clearly because some coverage of Entire has been loose with the word "co-founder." Dohmke joined the GitHub orbit in 2014 when Microsoft acquired his mobile analytics startup HockeyApp, which he co-founded with Stefan Haubold and Michael Simmons. He moved into GitHub's leadership after the 2018 Microsoft acquisition, and in November 2021 became GitHub's CEO following Nat Friedman's departure. He served in that role for nearly four years, overseeing the launch and growth of GitHub Copilot to more than 20 million users.
Chacon left GitHub a decade ago, in 2016 — two years before the Microsoft acquisition. He found out the deal had happened via a call from a Microsoft corporate lawyer. After GitHub, he co-founded Chatterbug, a language learning platform, alongside Tom Preston-Werner, which raised an $8M Series A in 2018. He eventually relocated to Berlin, where he's been building ever since.
Scott Chacon and GitButler
GitButler was founded in 2023 and describes itself as a next-generation version control client powered by Git, rebuilt from the ground up for the way developers actually work today — which increasingly means working with AI agents generating code across multiple workstreams simultaneously.
The core problem Chacon is solving: the way Git models branches doesn't match how people actually work. You have one working directory. If you're working on three things at once, you're constantly stashing, switching, and losing context. GitButler introduces virtual branches — you can work on multiple branches at the same time in a single directory, and the tool manages the separation. Combined with stacked branching, unlimited undo, and first-class AI agent integration, it's closer to a complete rethink of the version control client than an incremental improvement.
"I wanted a Git client, but I didn't want it to act like Git," Chacon has said. The underlying data is still standard Git, so it interoperates with existing tools and platforms — but the interface and workflow model are different.
GitButler is also open-source (built on Tauri, Rust, and Svelte), and integrates natively with Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI coding tools. When an AI agent writes a commit, GitButler can capture the prompt and reasoning alongside the code change — so you have an auditable record of what the agent was trying to do, not just what it produced.
Chacon's co-founders are Kiril Videlov (CTO, previously built Codeball, a YC-backed AI code review tool) and Mattias Granlund (CPO, from Meta's engineering organization).
The funding: On April 8, 2026, GitButler announced a $17M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. The a16z partners leading the deal were Peter Levine (who joins the board) and Matt Bornstein. Fly Ventures and A.Capital, both from the seed round, also participated.
Thomas Dohmke and Entire
Entire launched out of stealth on February 10, 2026, with a stated mission to help software teams "reimagine the software development lifecycle for a world where machines are the primary producers of code."
Where GitButler rebuilds the mechanics of how you interact with version control, Entire is focused on observability and governance — understanding what AI agents actually did, and why.
The company's first product is Checkpoints, an open-source CLI tool that automatically captures the context of an AI coding session — the prompts, reasoning, and decisions made by an AI agent — and stores it alongside each Git commit. The result is an auditable contribution graph that shows not just what changed, but the full chain of intent behind every AI-generated change. For teams where AI agents are writing significant portions of the codebase, this matters: reviewing an AI commit in a standard PR review doesn't show you what the agent was trying to achieve or what alternatives it considered.
Dohmke's East Berlin upbringing and German engineering background (he studied computer engineering at Technische Universität Berlin and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Glasgow) clearly shapes how he thinks about software systems at scale. The Entire team of 27 people is fully remote, spanning the US, Australia, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, with a significant contingent from GitHub and Atlassian.
Stefan Haubold, Dohmke's HockeyApp co-founder from 2014, is on the team.
The funding: Entire raised $60M at a $300M valuation in a seed round announced on February 10, 2026. The round was led by Felicis and joined by Madrona, M12 (Microsoft's venture arm), Basis Set, 20VC, Cherry Ventures, Picus Capital, and Global Founders Capital. Individual backers include Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, and developer newsletter writer Gergely Orosz. Felicis described it as the largest seed investment ever for a developer tools startup.
One clarification on the framing in some coverage: Entire raised a seed round, not a Series A. A $60M seed at a $300M valuation is extraordinary by any measure, but the round label matters — there's no Series A from Entire yet.
Are they competing with each other?
Not directly. The two products sit at different layers of the same problem.
GitButler is a Git client — it replaces the interface through which you interact with version control day-to-day. It optimizes the commit, branch, and review workflow for a world where you and several AI agents might be working on overlapping code changes simultaneously.
Entire is a governance and observability layer — it captures the context of what AI agents did so that teams can audit, review, and understand AI-written code. It doesn't replace your Git client; it adds a metadata layer on top of Git commits.
A developer could plausibly use both. GitButler handles the branching and commit mechanics; Entire's Checkpoints records the AI session context. They're complementary rather than competitive, both addressing the same underlying premise: that AI-generated code is here, and the existing toolchain wasn't designed for it.
The broader competitive landscape for both includes GitHub itself (which is unlikely to stand still in either area), GitKraken, and Graphite — though Graphite was acquired by Cursor in December 2025, collapsing one competitor into the AI coding agent space more directly.
What happened to the other GitHub co-founders?
For completeness:
Tom Preston-Werner left GitHub in 2014 following an internal harassment investigation (he denied the findings). He co-founded Chatterbug with Chacon, and now runs Preston-Werner Ventures, a $100M pre-seed and seed fund that has backed over 175 startups including Stripe, Cursor, Netlify, Snyk, Supabase, PlanetScale, and Retool. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2023.
Chris Wanstrath led GitHub through the Microsoft acquisition as CEO and then departed. In 2023 he announced Null Games, a games publishing studio, and plans for a browser game platform called Void. In 2024 he co-founded the Ladybird Browser Initiative, a non-profit building a new independent web browser from scratch.
P.J. Hyett became a professional racing driver. He founded AO Racing in 2022, competes in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, and has raced in the LMP2 class at Le Mans.
The underlying bet
Both GitButler and Entire are making the same core argument: that the rise of AI coding agents is a workflow-level change, not just a productivity multiplier. The tools developers built their practices around — commit-per-task branching, pull request review, code diffs — were designed for humans writing code one line at a time. When an AI agent produces 500 lines across three files in thirty seconds, those tools start to show their age.
Chacon is rebuilding the client — the interface between developer and repository. Dohmke is adding the governance layer — the record of what AI systems actually decided and why. Together they represent a fairly complete picture of what the AI-era developer toolchain might need to look like, coming from two people who built the infrastructure that most of the world's code currently runs on.
The $77M in combined funding suggests investors think the same.