Compare / Dapper Labs vs GitPod
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Dapper Labs
GitPod
BUSINESS MODEL
Dapper Labs
Platform and marketplace — Dapper Labs builds NFT products and earns revenue from primary sales (minting new NFTs and selling them to users), marketplace transaction fees (5% on peer-to-peer trades), and licensing fees paid to sports leagues for using their IP. The company also built the Flow blockchain, which it controls and operates.
Revenue is heavily tied to NFT trading volume and new user acquisition. The licensing deals with NBA, NFL, UFC, and LaLiga give Dapper Labs exclusive rights to create digital collectibles from official content — a massive competitive moat when the market is hot, and a significant cost burden when the market cools.
GitPod
GitPod started as freemium: a free tier of monthly cloud hours, paid plans for more hours and bigger workspaces, and enterprise contracts with self-hosted and dedicated options. As Ona it shifted toward enterprise contracts for running AI coding agents inside a customer's own cloud, with governance and security controls.
It said enterprise annual recurring revenue quadrupled year over year before the rename. OpenAI acquired the company in 2026, and existing customer commitments continue to be supported.
HOW THEY STARTED
Dapper Labs
Roham Gharegozlou was running a blockchain company called Axiom Zen when his team launched CryptoKitties in November 2017 — a game where users could buy, breed, and trade digital cats as NFTs on Ethereum. It went so viral that it congested the entire Ethereum network and accounted for 25% of all Ethereum traffic.
CryptoKitties proved that people would pay real money for unique digital assets, but it also proved that Ethereum couldn't handle consumer-scale applications. Gharegozlou spun out Dapper Labs in 2018 to solve both problems: build consumer NFT products AND build a blockchain (Flow) that could actually handle millions of users.
The NBA came calling in 2019, licensing their highlights for what became NBA Top Shot. When Top Shot launched in October 2020, a LeBron James dunk clip sold for $208,000.
By February 2021, Top Shot was processing $50 million in daily transactions. The NFT boom had arrived and Dapper Labs was at the center of it.
GitPod
The GitPod team came out of TypeFox, a German developer tools company in Kiel behind the Theia cloud IDE framework. Sven Efftinge and his colleagues realized the biggest pain point was not the editor itself but the environment.
Developers spent hours configuring machines, installing dependencies and debugging "it works on my machine" problems.
They launched GitPod to provide instant, automated cloud development environments. One click from a GitHub or GitLab repo opened a fully configured workspace with dependencies installed and tools ready.
Johannes Landgraf, who became CEO, and CTO Christian Weichel later led the company through its rename to Ona in 2025 and its sale to OpenAI in 2026.
HOW THEY GREW
Dapper Labs
Licensing deals with major sports leagues gave Dapper Labs content that no competitor could replicate. NBA Top Shot specifically targeted sports fans, not crypto enthusiasts — a much larger addressable market.
The custodial wallet and credit card payments removed every crypto friction point, making it possible for someone with zero blockchain knowledge to buy an NFT in two minutes. Pack drops with limited supply created urgency and excitement similar to physical trading card releases.
Building the Flow blockchain gave Dapper Labs control over transaction costs and speed, avoiding Ethereum's congestion and gas fee problems. Celebrity involvement (Michael Jordan, Kevin Durant, Will Smith all invested) generated press coverage and credibility.
GitPod
GitPod grew through open source community adoption and one-click integrations with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, where a "Gitpod" button on a repo launched a ready workspace. It later moved upmarket to banks and pharmaceutical companies that wanted cloud development under tight security.
In 2025 it bet the company on AI agents, renaming itself Ona and claiming its own agents were producing most of its merged code. That bet ended in a sale to OpenAI in 2026.
THE HARD PART
Dapper Labs
The NFT market collapsed. NBA Top Shot's monthly sales fell from $224 million in February 2021 to under $5 million by late 2022.
The $7.6 billion valuation from 2021 looks nearly impossible to justify with current revenue. Massive layoffs — the company cut over 50% of staff in multiple rounds through 2022 and 2023.
The Flow blockchain never achieved the developer adoption needed to become a major ecosystem — most NFT activity stayed on Ethereum and later Solana. Licensing deals with sports leagues require minimum guarantees regardless of volume, creating fixed costs that hurt when revenue drops.
Regulatory risk — the SEC has investigated whether NBA Top Shot moments are unregistered securities. And the core question: are digital sports highlights a lasting collectible category or were they a pandemic-era novelty?
GitPod
GitHub Codespaces, backed by Microsoft and GitHub's enormous distribution, was a direct competitor, and AWS stopped taking new Cloud9 customers in 2024, a sign of how tough the cloud IDE market was. Convincing developers to give up their carefully configured laptops proved hard.
Then AI coding tools threatened to make the whole category a feature. GitPod's answer was to reinvent itself as Ona, an AI agent platform, and ultimately to sell to OpenAI in 2026 rather than compete alone.
THE PRODUCTS
Dapper Labs
NBA Top Shot — officially licensed digital basketball highlights ("moments") sold as NFTs. Users buy packs, trade moments, and complete challenges.
NFL All Day — same concept applied to American football highlights. UFC Strike — officially licensed UFC fight moments as NFTs.
LaLiga Golazos — Spanish soccer league highlights as digital collectibles. Flow blockchain — Dapper Labs' own blockchain designed for consumer applications, used by NBA Top Shot and other products.
Dapper Wallet — custodial crypto wallet that works with credit cards, removing the complexity that makes normal crypto wallets unusable for regular people.
GitPod
Before 2025: cloud development environments, instant pre-configured workspaces defined in a .gitpod.yml file, with prebuilds and support for VS Code and JetBrains, plus a self-hosted enterprise option. As Ona (since September 2025): a platform for running software engineering AI agents in secure, sandboxed cloud environments, with VS Code in the browser and access from phone, tablet or laptop.
Since August 2026 the technology is part of OpenAI's Codex team.
WHO BACKED THEM
Dapper Labs
Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, GV (Google Ventures), Samsung, and celebrity investors including Michael Jordan, Kevin Durant, and Will Smith. The $7.6 billion valuation was reached in a 2021 funding round.
GitPod
Speedinvest led the $3 million seed in October 2020, with Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures US. General Catalyst led a $13 million round in April 2021.
GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner led the $25 million Series A in November 2022. Total funding was about $41 million.