Pick JetBrains if you write code professionally and want AI agents inside an IDE that already understands your project. It is run by CEO Kirill Skrygan, stays privately owned, and lets you bring Claude, Codex or its own Mellum2.1 model through ACP.
JetBrains is a developer tools company founded in Prague in February 2000 and now headquartered in Amsterdam. It makes IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and the Kotlin language, and more recently has added the Junie coding agent and the open Mellum models. It employs more than 2,600 people.
Founded: 2000 · HQ: Amsterdam, Netherlands · Team: 2000-5000 · CEO: Kirill Skrygan · Funding: Privately owned, no outside funding round disclosed
About JetBrains
JetBrains is a privately owned software company that builds tools for developers. It was founded in February 2000 in Prague by Sergey Dmitriev, Valentin Kipyatkov and Eugene Belyaev. The parent company today is JetBrains N.V., headquartered in Amsterdam, while JetBrains s.r.o. in Prague has handled EMEA and APAC sales since 2001. The 2026 corporate overview counts more than 2,600 employees across 14 offices, with R&D centers in cities including Prague, Berlin, Munich, Warsaw, Madrid, Belgrade, Yerevan, Paphos, Limassol and Boston.
The core business is professional IDEs. The range covers IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, GoLand, Rider, CLion, PhpStorm, RubyMine, RustRover and DataGrip, sold alongside team tools such as TeamCity, YouTrack and Qodana, and the languages and frameworks Kotlin, Ktor, Exposed and MPS. JetBrains reports 12.5 million or more recurring active users and says 88 of the Fortune Global Top 100 companies use its products. Pricing is by Toolbox subscription, monthly or annual, with free licenses for qualifying students and open-source projects.
In recent years the company has layered AI onto that base. Junie is its coding agent, available through JetBrains AI and built into the IDEs. Air runs several agents in parallel under human oversight, JetBrains Central is an open platform for governing agentic software at organization scale, Koog is a framework for building AI agents in Kotlin or Java, and DPAI Arena is a benchmark effort for developer productivity. JetBrains also backs the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), which lets IDEs host outside agents, so developers can run Junie, OpenAI Codex or Claude Agent from OpenAI and Anthropic with their own models, keys or subscriptions. The company says its AI tools passed a six-figure active paid user count in Q4 2025.
In June 2026 JetBrains open-sourced Mellum2, a 12B mixture-of-experts model with 2.5B active parameters. On October 8, 2026 it released Mellum2.1 under the Apache 2.0 license, with the architecture unchanged and the work concentrated in reinforcement learning across millions of sandboxed runs in thousands of environments. JetBrains compared it with Mellum2, Qwen3.5-9B from Alibaba Cloud and Gemma 4 E4B from Google DeepMind, and positions it as a fast worker for coding agents that teams can host on their own hardware. These are the vendor's own results, not independent ones.
JetBrains lists its funding as private and discloses no outside investment round or valuation. Kirill Skrygan became CEO in February 2024, taking over from Maxim Shafirov, after working at the company since 2010 on ReSharper, Rider and the IntelliJ platform. The company frames its goal as better daily work for professional developers, and describes its independence as a deliberate choice to stay focused on long-term product quality.
In AI coding assistance, JetBrains competes with GitHub Copilot from Microsoft and GitHub, with Cursor, Windsurf and Claude Code, and with assistants such as Tabnine, Qodo and Sourcegraph. Its edge is depth inside the IDE: refactoring, inspections, debugging and version control that an agent can lean on, plus a model-agnostic stance. Its weakness is that it is a tools company rather than a frontier lab, so its own models are small and its strongest agent results come from partner models.
Mission
We make professional software development a more productive and enjoyable experience.
Products
- IntelliJ IDEA (IDE for Java and Kotlin): https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/
- PyCharm (IDE for Python): https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/
- Junie (AI coding agent): https://junie.jetbrains.com/
- Air (Multi-agent development environment): https://www.jetbrains.com/air/
- Mellum (Open-weight coding model family): https://www.jetbrains.com/mellum/
Links
Frequently Asked Questions
How much funding has JetBrains raised?
JetBrains lists its funding as private in its 2026 corporate overview and has not disclosed an outside investment round or a valuation. The company describes itself as privately owned and organically grown, so it is funded by product revenue. Founded in February 2000, it has not announced plans for an IPO.
What products does JetBrains make in 2026?
JetBrains sells professional IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and WebStorm, team tools such as TeamCity and YouTrack, and the Kotlin language. Its AI line includes the Junie coding agent, Air, JetBrains Central and the open Mellum model. Plans run through Toolbox subscriptions billed monthly or yearly, with free licenses for students and open-source work.
How does JetBrains handle data privacy and compliance?
JetBrains publishes a GDPR-based privacy notice and says its Trust Center covers security, compliance and governance for enterprise buyers. HokAI could not confirm a specific certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 from a page it could read, so none is listed here. Check the vendor Trust Center before a procurement review.
Who are JetBrains' main competitors?
In AI coding, JetBrains faces GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf and Claude Code. It tends to win where deep IDE refactoring and debugging matter, and where teams want to pick their own model through ACP. It loses to those rivals on fully agent-first workflows built around a single frontier model.
How do you start using JetBrains tools?
Download the Toolbox App or a single IDE from jetbrains.com and start a free trial. Junie and the other AI agents are enabled from inside the IDE, and the open Mellum2.1 weights can be downloaded from Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. A first project opens within minutes.