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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
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