GitLab: $268 Million Funding At $2.75 Billion Valuation

Source:-pulse2.com

• DevOps platform GitLab announced it has raised $268 million in Series E funding at a $2.75 billion valuation

GitLab — a DevOps platform delivered as a single application — announced it has raised a $268 million Series E round of funding valuing the company at a $2.75 billion valuation. This funding round was led by ICONIQ Capital and Goldman Sachs with participation from existing investor Y Combinator Continuity Fund.

GitLab provides teams with a single data store, one user interface, and one permission model across the DevOps lifecycle thus allowing teams to collaborate and work on a project from a single conversation, significantly reducing cycle time, and focus exclusively on building great software quickly.

We are incredibly excited to co-lead GitLab’s Series E funding round,” explained James Hayward from Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division. “Following our initial investment in 2018, we have witnessed first-hand the increased development velocity across our Engineering Division. We have been thoroughly impressed with GitLabs’ growth and customer reach and look forward to supporting the company as it goes from strength to strength.”

New investors Adage Capital Management, L.P, Alkeon Capital, Altimeter Capital, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners LP, Franklin Templeton, Light Street Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Two Sigma Ventures also joined the round. Including this round of funding, GitLab has raised $426 million to date.

To be competitive today, companies need to be 10x faster to market. We made an early bet that enterprises would benefit from a single application experience for DevOps teams to accelerate getting software products to market faster and more securely,” said Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO at GitLab. “I love hearing how our customers are innovating faster with a single DevOps application that enables Dev, Ops and Security to collaborate, and this funding will help more organizations experience the benefits of this unified DevOps experience.”

GitLab has plans to go public next year and it will be using the funding to further develop its platform, adding key features in areas like monitoring, planning and security. And in the past year, GitLab more than doubled its its employee count to support the over 100,000 organizations that use GitLab such as Ask Media Group, Charter Communication, Delta Air Lines, Goldman Sachs, Ticketmaster, Nvidia, and many more.

“GitLab’s ARR growth rate of 143% is a direct reflection of the positive business outcomes realized by our customers as they move to GitLab’s single application solution,” added Michael McBride, the Chief Revenue Officer at GitLab. “We’ve seen the industry follow our lead, as our customers dramatically increase the efficiency of their DevOps workflows and deliver their products to market much faster. This funding will accelerate delivery of the full vision and product scope of GitLab’s complete DevOps platform and deliver even more value to our customers.”

Several of GitLab customers will be speaking about their results with the DevOps platform at the company’s inaugural user conference GitLab Commit in Brooklyn. And in October, GitLab Commit will head to London where users will hear from EMEA-based customers.

GitLab is going to use the funding to continue to hire more team members in order to address product, marketing, sales, and administrative functions for supporting GitLab’s overall goal of unifying teams and helping organizations accelerate better software products to market faster and more securely.

GitLab grew from fewer than 10 people in 2015 to more than 800 team members in over 55 countries across the globe. And the company is planning to hire over 200 more.

“By building features for each stage of the DevOps lifecycle into a single application, GitLab is solving a major need in the market and their business continues to grow rapidly,” commented Matthew Jacobson, a General Partner at ICONIQ Capital. “We believe the company is exceptionally well-positioned to improve the work of millions of developers and enhance the way they build great products.”

In the last 3 quarters, GitLab supported over 100 meetups with 5,500 meetup members across 20 countries. And GitLab has more than 4,800 active contributors and receives an average of 180 improvements to each monthly release.

“GitLab provides us with a very stable, scalable, modern solution,” noted Kevin Sage, SCM manager at Nvidia. “Because of GitLab’s High Availability features, we have uptime near 100% and can now perform live upgrades with zero downtime in most cases. The ability to scale backend resources (servers) transparently to our users is a huge benefit. Now we can handle a large number of users and projects, both of which continue to grow quickly. Geo clusters allow us to provide significant performance benefits to users in remote offices since they can fetch data locally instead of across a WAN from around the world. A variety of modern features and integrations with other tools allow different teams to adopt what works for them, often without requiring assistance, which greatly reduces the support load for our GitLab team.”