Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sergey Dmitriev, Valentin Kipyatkov, and Eugene Belyaev founded JetBrains in 2000 as IntelliJ Software. The three Russian software developers opened their first office in Prague to build better tools for their peers.
Kotlin was open-sourced in February 2012 and became the preferred language for Android development after Google announced it as the official language in 2017. The language was named after the island near St. Petersburg and designed to be a modern alternative to Java.
The company's Russian legal entity was liquidated on the 21st of February 2023 following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. This decision marked a definitive end to their operations in the region and required the company to navigate complex international sanctions.
JetBrains reported an EBITDA of 200 million dollars in 2020 and achieved 11.4 million recurring active users by 2023. The company has never raised external funding and maintains financial independence through software subscriptions.
Kirill Skrygan replaced CEO Sergey Dmitriev in 2024 to provide strong leadership during turbulent times. Previous leadership changes included Oleg Stepanov and Maxim Shafirov taking over in 2012.
The company provided free educational subscriptions to over 1.8 million students and 94,000 teachers to support the global developer community. Their JetBrains Academy platform launched in 2019 and has reached 200,000 users with courses in Python, Java, and Kotlin.