GitHub is adding one million developers in India every 3 months: COO Kyle Daigle

GitHub COO Kyle Daigle

GitHub is adding one million developers in India every three months, COO Kyle Daigle told Moneycontrol in an interview, underscoring the country's growing importance to the Microsoft-owned developer platform as it aims to reach 1 billion developers by 2030.

Daigle, who is on his first visit to India, said that the country has over 18 million developers on GitHub, making it the fastest growing community on the platform. This is up from GitHub's earlier figure of 17 million developers in India in October 2024. Globally, GitHub had over 150 million developers as of December 2024.

"With a goal of a billion developers, there's no way to get there but through India. We've seen immense growth in India. It's not just the big numbers. It's also what those developers are doing" he said.

India's developer community is the second-largest contributor to open source projects on GitHub and also the second largest community contributing to public generative artificial intelligence (AI) projects on the platform, registering a 79 percent year-on-year growth from 2024.

Enterprises, startups, and students are among the key drivers of this growth, Daigle said. The company also introduced a free tier of its code completion tool GitHub Copilot to developers in December 2024, which has further fueled adoption.

The free tier is currently available through VS Code (Visual Studio Code), an integrated development environment developed by Microsoft, and provides developers access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month.

Daigle said he has traveled to many different countries, talking about AI-powered software development and Copilot, and what stands out about India is that developers and enterprises aren’t asking if they should use these tools, but how to adopt them faster.

"More people are seeing the impact of Indian developers. With us making it a little bit more accessible day by day, more people can easily choose to join in and become one of those billion developers" he said.

In November 2024, GitHub launched GitHub Secure Open Source Fund, an initiative to fund open-source projects and provide support to improve their security and sustainability by offering security education, mentorship, free access to the company's products, and certification among others.

Daigle said that online stockbroker Zerodha was one of the largest contributors to the fund. GitHub has announced plans to invest $1.25 million across 125 projects through the initiative.

Read: AI will not replace developers, will instead create more work: GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke

Big focus on education

Going forward, Daigle said that student education will be a big focus area for the company.

"Through our DevRel (developer relations) and education teams, we're continuing to ensure that universities in India, particularly those where faculty and students may not have expertise, have access to the tools, technology, and skills they need," he said.

GitHub also plans to work its way down to high school students, helping both students and teachers learn how to use this technology sooner.

"If we have students learn how to code, they are more likely to become open source developers. Open source developers are more likely to join a startup or work in one. Later, they may move on to an enterprise or start their own startup and grow it into a new enterprise" Daigle said.

GitHub's IT collaboration

Another key focus area are enterprises, particularly information technology (IT) service giants such as Infosys and Wipro, who have been one of the earliest and most significant adopters of the company's AI products such as GitHub Copilot.

Daigle said that Infosys and other firms are first adopting these AI tools internally, and then helping their customers implement it in their businesses.

"They saw the value of what AI can provide to their internal engineering work, and then engaged their customers to also join the journey with us" he said.

After witnessing significant productivity and throughput gains using GitHub Copilot internally, these IT giants are now working with their customers to adopt the tool within their businesses, Daigle said. He noted that over the past year, these firms have driven much of Copilot's early adoption since they wanted to first prove its value for themselves and then for their customers.

As of October 2024, over 18,000 Infosys developers had used GitHub Copilot to generate more than 7 million lines of code, Microsoft said at the time, while announcing an expanded generative AI collaboration with India's second-largest IT firm to accelerate global enterprise AI adoption.

GitHub also announced a partnership with Infosys in June 2024 to launch its first GitHub Center of Excellence, aimed at speeding up the process of software production.