UPDATED 15:30 EDT / SEPTEMBER 19 2018

CLOUD

Looking to late 2020 IPO, GitLab raises $100M at $1.1B valuation

GitLab Inc. today announced that it has raised a $100 million funding round led by Iconiq Capital LLC, a prolific startup fund with high-profile clients such as Mark Zuckerberg.

The firm was joined by returning investors Khosla Ventures and GV. The fresh capital will fuel GitLab’s rapid expansion in the developer tooling market.

The company offers a code management platform that’s used at more 100,000 organizations, including the Nasdaq Stock Market, Intel Corp. and NASA. GitLab started out with a fairly narrow focus on hosting code repositories. Its main rival in this segment is GitHub Inc., which became part of Microsoft Corp. last year through a $7.5 billion acquisition that sent ripples through the industry.

Over the the past few years, GitLab has expanded into a fairly large number of additional areas in an effort to stand out from its bigger rival.

The startup’s platform now provides features for practically all the major steps involved in building software. GitLab enables developers to test that their code works as expected, look for security vulnerabilities and exchange feedback with colleagues. To top it all off, the platform includes capabilities that make it possible to automate large parts of the workflow to free up person-hours.

GitLab’s expansion has brought it a considerable amount of new competition. The application security segment and many of the other areas where the startup presently operates are each contested by multiple rivals, including some such as Atlassian Corp. plc that are more deeply entrenched. Today’s funding should enable the startup to step up its efforts across those markets. 

GitLab Chief Executive Officer Sid Sijbrandij told TechCrunch that most of the capital will go toward stepping up product development. He said the startup raised the funding a few quarters earlier than it had originally intended because Iconiq offered favorable financing terms.

Looking ahead, Sijbrandij divulged that the plan is to launch an initial public offering public by November 2020. GitLab has raised a total of $145 million in funding including this latest round and is now valued at a unicorn-status $1.1 billion.

Image: GitLab

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU