GitHub Copilot crosses 20 million all-time users

GitHub Copilot, an AI coding tool offered by Microsoft-owned GitHub, has now reached more than 20 million users, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company’s earnings call Wednesday. A GitHub spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that this number represents “all-time users.”

That means five million people have tried out GitHub Copilot for the first time in the last three months; the company reported in April the tool had reached 15 million users. Microsoft and GitHub don’t report how many of these 20 million people have continued to use the AI coding tool on a monthly or daily basis — though those metrics are likely far lower.

Microsoft also reported GitHub Copilot, which is among the most popular AI coding tools offered today, is used by 90% of the Fortune 100. The product’s growth among enterprise customers has also grown about 75% compared to last quarter, according to the company.

AI coding tools are rising in popularity, and they seem to be one of the few AI products generating notable revenue. In 2024, Nadella said GitHub Copilot was a larger business than all of GitHub was when Microsoft acquired it in 2018. In the year since, it seems GitHub Copilot’s growth rate has continued in a positive direction.

The world’s most popular AI coding tools still have tiny user bases compared to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, which attract hundreds of millions of users every month. Of course, software engineering is more niche than the general informational queries offered by AI chatbots.

That said, software engineers and their employers seem to be willing to pay a premium for AI coding tools. And with Microsoft’s long list of enterprise customers and GitHub’s ecosystem of developers, GitHub Copilot is well positioned to dominate the market for enterprise AI coding tools.

Cursor, another popular AI coding tool, wants to challenge GitHub Copilot in the enterprise, and it’s been scooping up talent from fledgling AI startups to do so. Cursor reportedly had more than a million people using its product every day in March, according to Bloomberg. At that time, the company generated about $200 million in annualized recurring revenue. Today, Cursor’s ARR is more than $500 million, suggesting there are now a lot more people using its products everyday.

While GitHub Copilot and Cursor initially sought to tackle different parts of the developer experience, they’re steadily converging into similar products.

Both companies have recently introduced AI agents to review code and catch bugs introduced by humans. Github and Cursor are also both trying to create AI agents that automate programmer workflows, allowing developers to offload tasks altogether. Nadella said during Wednesday’s earnings call that GitHub was seeing great momentum with their AI coding agents.

Beyond Cursor, GitHub has an array of well-capitalized competitors that would like to sell AI coding tools to the enterprise.

There’s Google — which acquired the leaders of AI coding startup Windsurf — as well as Cognition, the maker of Devin that subsequently acquired the rest of Windsurf’s team. That’s not to mention OpenAI and Anthropic, which are both building out their own AI coding offerings powered by in-house AI models, Codex and Claude Code respectively, in an attempt to win the market.

The nascent space is quickly heating up into one of AI’s most competitive markets.