GitHub has raised $250m in funding from investors, boosting the valuation of the company to a reported $2bn.

The latest round of funding, led by Sequoia Capital, is expected to fuel its growth and expansion of its sales and engineering team.

According to reports, GitHub has been successful because of its open source approach, which allows programmers to alter and distribute computer code freely.

Presently, the company has more than 10 million registered users collaborating on 25 million software projects.

However, it charges for private software projects and organisations need to pay so that they can host GitHub on their premises to share code internally.

The Wall Street Journal cited GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath as saying: "We want to make really big investments,"

"There are millions of developers in the world today, and more people are learning to be software developers every day. Our platform empowers great software."

In 2012, the company raised its first institutional capital of $100m from Andreessen Horowitz, and with the latest round of funding the company has raised a total of $350m of outside funding.