Snap Inc.

GitPod

Snap Inc.

Snap's revenue comes almost entirely from advertising. Brands pay to run ads between Stories, in the Discover section, and through sponsored AR Lenses and Filters.

The ad business is powered by the time users spend on the platform — over 40 minutes per day for the average user under 25.

Snapchat+ is a subscription product launched in 2022 at $3.99/month, offering exclusive features like custom app icons, Story rewatch indicators, and priority support. It hit 12 million subscribers by 2024 — meaningful but still a small fraction of total revenue.

Snap also sells hardware — Spectacles (AR glasses) — but this has been more of an R&D investment than a revenue driver. Hardware revenue is negligible.

The long-term bet is that AR glasses become the next computing platform, and Snap wants to be the one building the operating system for your face.

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.

Snap Inc.

The origin story of Snapchat involves a Stanford fraternity, a disputed idea, and a lawsuit. In April 2011, Reggie Brown pitched the concept of disappearing photos to Evan Spiegel in their Kappa Sigma fraternity house.

Spiegel loved it and brought in Bobby Murphy, a math and computer science major, to build it. The app launched as "Picaboo" in July 2011.

The initial reception was rough — barely anyone downloaded it. Spiegel's mother was one of the first users.

They rebranded to "Snapchat" in September 2011 and slowly gained traction among high school and college students who wanted to share photos without them living on the internet forever. The disappearing message format felt risky, intimate, and fun — the opposite of Facebook's permanent timeline.

Then came the co-founder drama. Reggie Brown claims he originated the core concept.

Spiegel and Murphy dispute this. Brown was pushed out of the company in 2012.

He filed a lawsuit in 2013 claiming intellectual property rights and breach of contract. The case settled in 2014 for $157.5 million — making Brown perhaps the most expensive person ever kicked out of a fraternity project.

Spiegel and Murphy continued building.

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.

Snap Inc.

Snapchat grew through word of mouth among teenagers and college students. The app spread through high schools like wildfire — kids told each other about it specifically because their parents weren't on it.

The anti-Facebook positioning was powerful: Snapchat was where you could be real, messy, and unfiltered because nothing was permanent.

International expansion drove the next wave. Snapchat invested heavily in localized content, Discover partnerships with local publishers, and market-specific features.

India became one of the fastest-growing markets after they launched Snapchat in Hindi and other local languages.

Augmented reality became the moat. Snap invested billions in AR technology, making the camera the centerpiece of the app.

AR Lenses went from silly face filters to genuinely useful tools — trying on sunglasses, previewing furniture in your room, translating signs in real time. By making the camera "smart," Snap differentiated from text-based social networks and positioned itself for the AR glasses future.

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.

Snap Inc.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is the permanent existential threat. When Spiegel turned down Zuckerberg's $3 billion offer in 2013, Zuckerberg responded by copying every single Snapchat feature — Stories on Instagram, disappearing messages on Messenger, AR filters on Facebook.

Instagram Stories alone now has over 500 million daily users, dwarfing Snapchat. Every feature Snap invents, Meta copies within months and deploys to a user base 5x larger.

TikTok redefined short-form content and stole attention from every other social platform. Snapchat launched Spotlight to compete, but TikTok's algorithmic feed and creator ecosystem are years ahead.

Young users who once spent hours on Snapchat now split that time with TikTok.

Monetization lags behind competitors. Snap's average revenue per user is significantly lower than Meta's or TikTok's.

Advertisers often treat Snapchat as an afterthought — they build campaigns for Instagram and TikTok first, then maybe run them on Snap. The company has been unprofitable for most of its public life, with only recent quarters showing operational improvement.

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.

Snap Inc.

Snapchat — the core messaging and social media app with 850+ million monthly active users, known for disappearing messages, Stories, and the Snap Map. Snap Lenses & Filters — augmented reality effects that overlay digital content on the real world through the camera.

Over 3.5 billion Lenses have been created by the community. Stories — Snapchat invented the Stories format in 2013 (24-hour disappearing photo/video collections).

Every major social platform copied it. Snap Map — a real-time map showing friends' locations and local events.

Used by hundreds of millions and particularly popular with Gen Z. Spotlight — Snap's TikTok competitor: a feed of short-form vertical videos from the community, with creators earning a share of revenue.

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.

Snap Inc.

Benchmark led the Series A — one of the most legendary early-stage investments in tech history. Lightspeed Venture Partners invested early.

Tencent bought a 12% stake, giving Snap a strategic investor from the world's largest gaming company. Alibaba, General Atlantic, and Fidelity participated in later rounds.

The March 2017 IPO raised $3.4 billion at a $24 billion valuation — Spiegel was 26 years old.

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.