Code collaboration and DevOps platform GitLab has raised $100 million in a series D round of funding led by Iconiq Capital, with participation from existing investors GV and Khosla Ventures.
The latest round of funding comes nearly a year after GitLab announced its $20 million series C round, at which point the San Francisco-based company revealed its valuation had more than doubled since its series B round a year earlier — but it didn’t give a precise dollar valuation at the time. Today, however, the company said that it is now valued at $1.1 billion, bestowing upon it the much-coveted “unicorn” status.
Code-hosting and collaboration
Founded in 2014, GitLab is often lumped together with GitHub, insofar as they offer similar code-hosting repositories that help developer teams collaborate and manage their software development projects as they evolve. However, GitLab has been pushing beyond that realm into other developer-focused products. Last September, with the release of GitLab 10.0, the company took a big step forward in its DevOps mission as it sought to target the entire software development, deployment, and monitoring market. During its last big fundraise, the company discussed how it plans to “unite development and operations in one user experience.”
And so here we are, one year later, and GitLab has just bagged a gargantuan tranche of cash, taking its total money raised to more than $145 million. The company said that it plans to use its fresh cash injection to “become best-in-class” in every DevOps software category.
“GitLab is emerging as a leader across the entire software development ecosystem by releasing software at an exceptional velocity,” noted Iconiq Capital partner Matthew Jacobson. “They’re taking the broad software development market head-on by developing an application that allows organizations to ship software at an accelerated rate with major increases in efficiency.”
Ultimately, GitLab is setting out to build an all-in-one platform that saves enterprises from having to integrate myriad developer services, such as Atlassian’s Jira, GitHub, New Relic, and BlackDuck, which can lead to little data silos. GitLab wants to serve as a single go-to for all a developer’s needs, and it said that it is already in a position to do so, though it still needs to improve in some areas.
“Some of our tools, like continuous integration, are already best in class,” GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told VentureBeat. “Some newer tools like monitoring are more recent and need to catch up, but with this raise we have to money to do help our community to do so.”
One big challenge GitLab has faced is its constant comparisons to GitHub. But now that GitLab is meandering into more of a DevOps platform, it will be on a mission to tell its customers all it can do.
“Currently most of our users are not aware how much GitLab can do for them — most think of us as version control with a bit of continuous integration,” Sijbrandij continued. “When we tell them they can get rid of the burden of integrating nine different tools together, they love that. It is up to us to tell this story every chance we get. The fundraise means we can create more opportunities to do so.”
Investments
This latest raise comes just a few months after Microsoft revealed plans to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion, coincidentally shortly after GitLab revealed it was ditching Microsoft Azure for Google Cloud. And Atlassian — which is perhaps best known for its issue-tracking software Jira — is riding on the crest of the wave on Wall Street. The Australian company went public on the Nasdaq back in 2015, and its shares recently soared past the $90 mark for the first time, an increase of more than 150 percent on last year.
Put simply, developer tools are hot, and this is why Iconiq, GV, and Khosla are going all-in on GitLab.
“We’re reaching a point where every company is a software company, and larger organizations are starting to realize that without developers, they cannot drive innovation,” Sijbrandij said. “Developers play a crucial role in helping drive business growth and have officially landed a seat at the table. We want GitLab to become synonymous with a well-run engineering organization.”
Ordinarily, getting a company to spill the beans on its IPO plans is something of a challenge. But GitLab bucked that trend a few months back when it stated that it intends to go public on Wednesday, November 18, 2020. “We are still striving to realize this ambition,” Sijbrandij confirmed to VentureBeat.