CEO of GitHub Yonke unveils its answer to the extinction of AI coding agents – GeekWire
The former CEO of GitHub, Thomas Dohmke, is implementing a distributed network of coding, which means that centralized platforms like the one that works as part of Microsoft will struggle to cope with the needs of AI agents on their own.
Yonke, which emerged in February with a 60 million seed round, unveiled a preview of its distributed Git network on Wednesday, with active regions in the US, Europe, and Australia. Developers can mirror an existing GitHub repository in All in one step, keeping their code in place while AI agents compile and pull a quick, close copy.
Dohmke cited a principle espoused by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux and the Git version control system, in a 2007 speech: “If you’re not distributed, you’re not worth using.”
“In the era of agents, central Git hosting has become a critical responsibility, as the array of billions of agents and developers building a central server comes in the form of price limitations, high latency, or outages,” Dohmke said in a statement announcing the launch.
GitHub, acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018, is a prominent platform for storing and collaborating on software code. It is built on top of Git, an open source system that tracks changes across the entire codebase, designed from the ground up to run without a central server.
Dohmke, who is based in Bellevue, Wash., left GitHub last year after nearly four years as CEO. He founded Entire with Cole Driver, the former vice president of GitHub. The fully remote company has grown to more than 40 employees in nine countries.
The $60 million seed round was led by Felicis, with participation from Madrona, Microsoft’s M12 business unit, and Basis Set Ventures, along with individual investors including Yahoo founder Jerry Yang and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. Felicis called it the largest seed investment ever in a developer tools startup, valuing the company at $300 million.
“We think it could be the next platform for developers,” said Tim Porter, Madrona’s managing director, in an interview this week.
He cited the company’s compatibility with major coding agents — working in partnership with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and others instead of competing with them — as a key factor driving its chances of success.
Neither sets itself up as a direct competitor to GitHub, and M12’s participation is a sign of the evolving partnership between the two. Currently, the mirroring method is designed to complement GitHub, not replace it.
Longer term, the company’s ambitions are much bigger. An announcement Wednesday morning about a preview of Git’s distributed network says the company plans to eventually let developers manage new repositories natively, not just display existing ones.
Madrona, in a blog post earlier this year, described GitHub, while “incredibly important,” as “quickly becoming a legacy platform” and said Entire’s goal is “not just to replace GitHub, but to replace it.”
The Seattle-based firm’s investment was led by Porter and S. The late “Soma” Somasegar, former vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division and led Dohmke’s first acquisition, HockeyApp, announced in 2014.
It has not yet disclosed prices. Porter said the company plans to introduce commercial and individual tiers after the preview period, with a combination of seat-based and usage-based pricing alongside the free tier and open source materials.
The new distributed Git network is part of a wider platform. It all also provides a tool that automatically records the reasoning and context behind the changes in AI-generated code — the instructions the developer gave, the steps the agent took, and why it made the decisions it did — and stores it alongside the code itself in a repository.
The company says it now integrates with all major coding agents, including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Factory AI, and GitHub Copilot.
It’s also announcing some new features on Wednesday:
- Every Case, which traces a line of code back to the agent dialog that generated it.
- Review All, which implements automatic code reviews using that context.
- Code and Semantic search, which queries the history of code changes and the reasoning behind them.
“Time logs are now the second most important part of software development,” Dohmke said in his statement, “and they are in the repository as well as the code.”
