A year after achieving unicorn status, development tooling provider GitLab Inc. today announced that it has taken in an additional $268 million investment from a large consortium of new and returning backers.

The round saw the participation of Iconiq Capital, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Tiger Management, Franklin Templeton and over half a dozen others. GitLab is worth $2.75 billion post-money. That’s more than double the $1.1 billion valuation the startup received after the $100 million funding round last year that inducted it into the unicorn club.

New York-based GitLab provides a code hosting platform that competes with Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub and Atlassian Corp. Plc.’s BitBucket. Over the last few years, the startup has built out an expansive feature set that covers many major aspects of the software development lifecycle. Its platform includes tools that allow programmers to find security flaws in their applications, collaborate with one another and discover ways to improve their productivity.

GitLab is built around the concept of continuous integration and continuous delivery. These two terms refer to a pair of complementary, and hugely popular, development methodologies that allow software teams to push out code updates several times a day instead of once every week or every quarter as was once the norm.

GitLab has managed to win over many of the large enterprises that are adopting this approach. The startup’s platform is used by more than 100,000 organizations including Nvidia Corp., Broadcom Inc., Uber Technologies Inc. and numerous other major tech firms.

This market traction has put GitLab on a trajectory toward the stock market. After the startup’s previous funding round last year, chief executive officer Sid Sijbrandij said that his plan was to hold an initial public offering by November 2020.

In parallel with the preparations for the eventual listing, GitLab continues to focus on driving growth. The startup has doubled its headcount in the past year to more than 800 workers and looks to hire its 1,000th employee before year’s end. The additional staff will bolster GitLab’s product, sales and marketing teams.

The startup’s biggest rival, GitHub, has also been pursuing new growth avenues. The Microsoft subsidiary is going down a similar path as GitLab and  expanding the focus of its platform beyond code hosting to adjacent use cases. Last month, for  instance, GitHub rolled out new continuous integration and continues delivery features to enable the kind of fast-paced software releases GitLab is geared towards enabling.

“GitLab can rightly claim to the be largest vendor-agnostic GitOps platform vendor in the world, now that Microsoft has acquired GitHub, its much larger direct competitor,” said James Kobielus, an analyst with SiliconANGLE sister market research company Wikibon. He noted that the open-source GitLab CE is used by more than 100,000 organizations around the globe, and customers of its closed-source product include Alibaba Group, IBM, SpaceX, Goldman Sachs and Ticketmaster.

However, Kobielus said GitLab lacks significant partnerships among cloud, enterprise IT and DevOps tooling providers.

“It will need these going forward if it hopes to compete in the GitOps arena against Microsoft and against a growing range of other startups,” he said. “Most likely, it will need to go public to acquire the funding needed to deepen its R&D and deliver on such roadmap promises as code analytics, requirements management, quality management, interactive application security testing, release governance, secrets management, cluster cost optimization, synthetic monitoring and so on.”

Image: GitLab