JetBrains

• 1. Introduction

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  JetBrains began in the year 2000 in Prague, founded by three Russian software developers with a single tool for cleaning up messy Java code. That first product, IntelliJ Renamer, was a humble start for a company that would go on to build some of the most widely used programming tools on earth. Today the firm sits at the center of how professional software gets written, tested, and shipped. How did a private company, one that has never raised a single round of outside funding, grow to serve more than eleven million recurring active users? And what does it mean when a tool designed to help write code becomes entangled in accusations tied to one of the largest security breaches in United States history?

• 2. Prague Origins

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  Sergey Dmitriev, Valentin Kipyatkov, and Eugene Belyaev launched the company under the name IntelliJ Software. Their first product, IntelliJ Renamer, addressed a specific pain that Java developers knew well: the tedious, error-prone work of renaming variables and classes across a codebase. The tool handled that mechanical work automatically, a preview of the philosophy that would shape every product to follow.

  By 2009, JetBrains had opened the core of its flagship IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, to the public as a free Community Edition, releasing it under the Apache License 2.0. That decision had a downstream effect the founders may not have fully anticipated: Google took the Community Edition as the foundation for Android Studio, the official IDE for Android development, which launched in 2012. When Eclipse ADT was officially discontinued in June 2015, Android Studio became the only recommended path for Android developers, and the IntelliJ platform quietly became the bedrock of mobile software built for more than two billion devices.

• 3. Leadership and Ownership

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  In 2012, founding CEO Sergey Dmitriev handed the role to Oleg Stepanov and Maxim Shafirov, who shared leadership responsibilities. A decade later, on the 1st of February 2024, Kirill Skrygan took over as CEO from Shafirov. The company has kept its ownership entirely private throughout. JetBrains has never raised external capital, and its headquarters moved to Amsterdam while maintaining offices across China, Europe, and the United States.

  InfoWorld magazine recognized the firm twice with its Technology of the Year Award, in 2011 and again in 2015. By 2020 the company had generated $200 million in EBITDA, a figure that underscores how profitable developer tooling can be when the product earns genuine loyalty rather than venture-funded growth.

• 4. The SolarWinds Shadow

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  In 2021, The New York Times reported that unknown parties may have embedded malware inside JetBrains' TeamCity software, a continuous integration and delivery platform used to build and test code. The alleged pathway led to the SolarWinds hack, which the paper described as potentially the biggest breach of United States networks in history. The CEO of SolarWinds raised the question of whether JetBrains' tools served as the entry point for the intrusion.

  JetBrains issued a press release stating the company had not been contacted by any government or security agency and had not taken part or been involved in the attack in any way. The accusation was never resolved into a formal finding, but the episode attached a significant shadow to TeamCity's reputation and put developer toolchain security onto the agenda of organizations that had never thought to examine it before.

• 5. Kotlin and Language Work

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  JetBrains created the Kotlin programming language in 2011, naming it after Kotlin Island, near St. Petersburg. The language runs on the Java Virtual Machine and can also compile to JavaScript or to native code via LLVM, giving developers a single language that spans servers, browsers, and native applications. In February 2012, JetBrains open-sourced Kotlin.

  The move that transformed Kotlin from an internal tool to an industry language came from outside the company. In May 2017, Google announced first-class support for Kotlin on Android. At Google I/O 2019, Google went further and declared Kotlin its preferred language for Android development entirely. Kotlin Multiplatform, a JetBrains technology that lets developers share Kotlin code across Android, iOS, desktop, web, and server targets, reached stable status with the release of Kotlin 1.9.20 in November 2023. The related Compose Multiplatform framework, which extends that code sharing to shared user interfaces, became stable for iOS in 2025.

• 6. ReSharper and the .NET Ecosystem

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  ReSharper, first released in 2004, is JetBrains' longest-running commercial product and the most popular extension on the Visual Studio Marketplace, with more than 2.5 million downloads. It was a primary revenue source in the company's early years. The extension gives .NET developers on-the-fly code quality analysis across C#, VB.NET, XAML, ASP.NET, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, HTML, and XML, along with more than 2,200 code inspections, over 60 refactoring actions, and 450 context actions.

  Interestingly, the work done on ReSharper eventually gave rise to Rider, JetBrains' standalone .NET IDE. Plans for a dedicated ReSharper IDE were explored after Visual Studio 2005 and later abandoned, but the engineering investment was not wasted: it became the foundation Rider was built on. Starting with version 2026.1, ReSharper expanded beyond Visual Studio to support Visual Studio Code and compatible editors such as Cursor, bringing C# tooling to a wider set of development environments.

• 7. AI Tools and New Directions

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  JetBrains AI Assistant ships in most JetBrains IDEs and draws on models from OpenAI and Google alongside proprietary models developed by JetBrains itself. The company's own Mellum model was released in April 2025. A separate product, Junie, launched in closed preview in January 2025 and became generally available in April 2025. Where the AI Assistant focuses on code completion, Junie is built to act as an autonomous coding agent, capable of working through tasks rather than simply suggesting the next line.

  The collaboration with Google Cloud added another layer. In 2024, JetBrains integrated Google's Gemini models into AI Assistant, making it the first such tool to combine functionality from GPT-4o, Gemini, and JetBrains' own models within a single interface. The partnership expanded further in 2025 when JetBrains integrated Gemini 3 Pro into both AI Assistant and Junie. JetBrains noted that the new model showed more than a 50 percent improvement over Gemini 2.5 Pro on solved benchmark tasks, a figure that gives some concrete measure of how quickly the underlying capabilities are shifting beneath the tools millions of developers use every day.

• 8. Community and Education Scale

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  In 2024 alone, 1,840,580 students and 94,041 teachers received complimentary JetBrains educational packs, and 2,172 schools and universities received 190,459 educational subscriptions for classroom use. A further 954,277 students received special discounts when renewing licenses after graduation. JetBrains Academy, introduced in 2019, reached 200,000 users by July 2020 and added certifications in November 2021 following community feedback that verifiability of completed work mattered to learners.

  The open source community also receives structured support: in 2024, 5,952 projects received 11,364 complimentary licenses. The User Group Support Program served 611 tech communities across 89 countries and regions. The Developer Recognition Program honored 1,284 community experts with All Products Pack subscriptions. JetBrains also sponsored 155 IT events in 2024. The company's annual Developer Ecosystem survey for 2024 drew responses from 23,262 developers, making it one of the larger annual snapshots of how the global programming community actually works, a resource that competitors and researchers alike rely on when trying to understand where the industry is heading.