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DevOps company GitLab Inc. today closed its first day of stock trading a hefty 35% above its initial offering price.

The stock had opened trading at 22% above its IPO offering price of $77 a share, which in turn was well above an already-elevated price range. The company raised more than $800 million in its IPO late Wednesday via the sale of 10.4 million shares, 2 million more than first planned.

Earlier this week, GitLab raised its expected price range from an initial forecast of $55 to $60 per share to a range of $66 to $69 per share, so the final price is a fairly big leap. The pricing values GitLab at $11 billion based on the 143 million shares that will be outstanding after the offering.

GitLab’s stock will start trading on the Nasdaq exchange Thursday under the ticker symbol “GTLB.”

GitLab sells development and collaboration tools that help developers to share code and create new applications faster. According to the company’s IPO filing, its software helps teams to “collaborate and work together to shorten the development life cycle and evolve from delivering software on a slow, periodic basis to rapid, continuous updates.”

GitLab’s competitors include Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub and Atlassian Corp. Plc.’s BitBucket.

The company is launching its IPO at a time when investors have shown a big appetite for cloud-based software companies. In particular, Wall Street has shown a lot of enthusiasm for companies that display rapid growth, even if they’re not yet profitable.

GitLab is one such company. In the first six months of the year it pulled in revenue of $108 million, its filing shows, up almost 50% from the same period one year ago. But the company also reported a net loss of $69 million for the period, up from a $43.5 million net loss a year before that.

Jyoti Bansal, co-founder and chief executive of the software delivery firm Harness Inc., told SiliconANGLE that GitLab’s IPO shines the spotlight on a software market category that has major force, with clear and growing demand for platforms that can help businesses get a better handle on the complexity of deploying code and applications.

“This moment also signals a sea change happening right now for the developer experience and modernization of software delivery,” Bansal added. “Developers are today’s innovation engine, and any company that truly wants to keep up with the pace of innovation will need a solution that makes developer experience and software delivery the North Star. That is what will continue expanding this market to new heights.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. agreed, saying that in this age, code and its management is the engine room of digital transformation

“It’s good to see one of the key players, GitLab, is reaching out to the capital markets to find more financing,” the analyst said. “The race is on to control the code repositories and GitLab faces many larger, better capitalized players. It’s success will count on the company management spending and investing the proceeds wisely to keep helping enterprises build their next generation applications.”

GitLab’s offering got a huge boost from the coronavirus pandemic and the era of remote work that was ushered in last year. Its platform, all about remote collaboration, was the perfect tonic for developers who found themselves forced to work from home. Indeed, the company itself has an entirely remote workforce of more than 1,350 employees, who have worked from home since it was founded in 2014.

Besides raising money, GitLab co-founder and Chief Executive Sid Sijbrandij (pictured) has indicated in the past that going public will help to raise awareness of the company’s offerings and accelerate its growth.

“One of the big things holding GitLab back is we’re not as well known,” Sijbrandij said in an 2020 interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s video studio. “Becoming a public company will help spread awareness about what we can do. We don’t mind sharing what we’re about and what our financials are.”

GitLab said in its filing it will use the IPO proceeds to make “significant investments” in sales and marketing, research and development and its partner ecosystem.

GitLab has a number of prominent backers, including Khosla Ventures, which owns 14% of the company, and Liquid 2 Ventures, a fund managed by legendary former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana.

Photo: SiliconANGLE