GitLab Inc.’s stock was riding high in extended trading today after the DevOps company posted strong first-quarter results that topped expectations, offered a strong forecast for the coming quarter and raised its full-year guidance.

The company reported a net loss for the quarter of $52.9 million, up from a loss of $26.1 million it recorded in the same period one year ago. The loss before certain costs such as stock compensation came to six cents per share, better than the 14-cent-per-share loss expected by Wall Street. Revenue jumped 45% from a year earlier, to $126.9 million, well ahead of the $117.8 million consensus estimate.

Those encouraging results were followed by strong guidance, with GitLab executives stating that they’re looking at second-quarter revenue of between $129 million and $130 million, above Wall Street’s consensus estimate of $127 million. The company also raised its full-year revenue forecast, saying it now sees sales of between $541 million and $543 million, up from its earlier range of $529 million to $533 million. Analysts were looking for full year revenue of $532.5 million.

Investors liked what they saw, and the company’s stock roared in extended trading. Having already gained more than 4% during the regular session, it jumped 32% after-hours.

GitLab is a pioneer of the DevOps industry. Its software allows companies to adopt a modern strategy of rapid, continuous software updates by combining their developer teams and information technology operations staff. Using GitLab’s tools, developers can share code more easily and create new applications much faster than before.

In comments to investors, GitLab co-founder and Chief Executive Sid Sijbrandij (pictured) talked up his company’s artificial intelligence positioning, saying that it’s perfectly placed to become the leading AI-powered DevSecOps platform. “Today, we deliver more AI-powered capabilities to customers than any other DevSecOps platform,” Sijbrandij said. “Our vision builds on that foundation to encompass the full software development lifecycle — from planning and development to security, deployment and maintenance.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said GitLab had an exceptional quarter, growing its business by more than 40%. “However, investors will probably have noticed that its operating costs grew faster than its revenue, resulting in a doubling of its loss per share,” he said. “It’s important to see revenue growth, but cost management will be even more critical in the coming quarters in order to achieve profitability.”

During the quarter, GitLab announced it had expanded a key partnership with Google Cloud to deliver new generative AI-powered features for developers directly within its platform while maintaining security and privacy standards. Generative AI is the technology that underlies OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT chatbot and Google Bard. It’s capable of generating new content from large sets of training data such as producing reports, summarizing large documents, doing research, generating insights, writing software code and even holding humanlike conversations.

The partnership sees GitLab gain access to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform for managed machine learning, which Google says can train AI models using 80% fewer lines of code than alternative platforms. It provides the same toolkit Google uses internally, and provides powerful training capabilities for GitLab to build its features.

“Against a backdrop of macroeconomic uncertainty, customers are looking to our AI-powered DevSecOps platform to drive efficiencies, increase productivity and accelerate their pace of innovation” said GitLab Chief Financial Officer Brian Robins. “We are poised to make the most of the estimated $40 billion total addressable market opportunity before us.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE