Gitpod has announced $13 million in funding led by General Catalyst, a bevy of product features, and its DevXConf virtual developer conference purely focused on improving the developer experience.

According to the company, the funding will help Gitpod expand its position as the leading platform for development environment automation, as well as to grow Gitpod’s open source community and relevant ecosystem partnerships.

Gitpod also announced three new product features. With VS Code in Gitpod, developers get the most popular editing experience combined with all the benefits of a fully automated, cloud-based solution.

With sudo privileges and Docker support, developers can build Docker images to run containers within their workspace. This is based on advanced namespace layering technology.

Finally, the entire dashboard has been redesigned to speed-up developers’ workflows.

DevXConf, organized by the Gitpod team, aims to bring together the best and the brightest from across the developer ecosystem with a set of talks and fireside chats. The virtual event will take place April 28-29, 2021.

“We write code within specific languages/frameworks, use tools, glue them together to (tool) chains, develop against APIs and communicate and collaborate with other developers. All of that should be efficient, sustainable and joyful,” said Sven Efftinge, CEO, Gitpod. “At DevXConf, some of the brightest minds from the community get together and have a conversation on how we can make software engineering more productive and fun.”