GitLab Reaches $14.9 Billion Valuation After IPO

October 22, 2021

Started as an open-source project in 2011 by co-founder Dmytro Zaporozhets, later joined by Sid Sijbrandij, expanded dramatically, placing GitLab on the top list of the skyrocketing companies for its growth of revenue. Originating from Ukraine, GitLab is a tech startup notable for being a fully remote workforce since its inception. Currently, the company employs more than 1,350 people in 65 countries. Dmytro Zaporozhets was a speaker at IT Arena 2018, sharing his views and experience in technologies, particularly on services that help tech specialists to work faster and more efficiently. 

GitLab shares jumped about 35 percent above their offer price in the Nasdaq debut on October 14, giving the software development platform a market capitalization of $14.9 billion, demonstrating a strong investor interest in fast-growing software companies. The company’s stock opened at $94.25 and closed at $103.89, compared with the initial public offering (IPO) price of $77 per share, while the company said it would likely sell shares at $66 to $69 each.

The open-source software project was founded by Ukrainian developers Dmytro Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov, and in 2013 joined by Sid Sijbrandij. The clients of GitLab include Goldman Sachs, Nvidia, Ticketmaster, Delta, etc. In 2018, GitLab raised $100 million in Series D-round funding led by ICONIQ Capital, becoming the first partly Ukrainian unicorn valued at more than $1 billion. Among GitLab’s competitors is GitHub service, which in 2018 was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion.

“I think that GitLab can be called a Ukrainian startup. One founder is from Ukraine, so it is partly a Ukrainian startup. Another founder is from the Netherlands, so it is partly a Dutch startup. Based on this, I believe that GitLab can be called a Ukrainian startup”, commented Dmytro Zaporozhets at IT Arena back in 2018.

So, why do people choose GitLab over other platforms? GitLab is feature-heavy, with lots of people standing behind it, updating and developing its features. Given this focus, GitLab invests most of the funding in its engineering efforts to build out its existing products but also to launch new ones. The platform offers both free and paid versions of the developer operations platform, a single application that brings together software development and IT operations. Developers in companies across industries can use it to write, package, release, and monitor code.

At its core, GitLab is a place where users can store their repositories, their code and work on it with their team, which is a remote host for repositories. But it’s not only the store that holds code, it does a little bit more. GitLab was initially popular as a social coding site to follow people. The company is very focused on the amount of features available for users, rapidly adding features and updating it constantly. On its platforms, users have boards, label them, tag people, move and organize them, whether they are in progress. All sorts of planning like issues, milestones, project management allow managing the project well.

So, GitLab is a mature project for organizing code and working on ideas. It has a cute logo and extended functionality; its application offers features to automate the entire DevOps life cycle, from planning to creation, verification, security testing, deployment and monitoring. GitLab is highly scalable and can be hosted on-premises or on cloud storage.