Originally reported by Pulse 2.0. Published September 2019.
GitLab Closes $268 Million Series E Funding Round
GitLab, the company behind the single-application DevOps platform of the same name, announced in September 2019 that it had raised $268 million in Series E funding at a post-money valuation of $2.75 billion. The round brought GitLab’s total funding raised to $426 million.
The round was co-led by ICONIQ Capital and Goldman Sachs, with continued participation from existing backer Y Combinator Continuity Fund. A broad group of new institutional investors also joined, including Adage Capital Management, Alkeon Capital, Altimeter Capital, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, Franklin Templeton, Light Street Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Two Sigma Ventures.
What GitLab Does: A Single Application for the Full DevOps Lifecycle
GitLab positions itself as the only DevOps platform delivered as a single application. Rather than stitching together separate tools for source control, CI/CD, security scanning, monitoring, and project planning, GitLab provides a unified data store, a single user interface, and one permission model that spans the entire software delivery lifecycle.
The practical benefit for engineering teams is that developers, operations engineers, and security teams can collaborate within the same platform without context-switching between multiple tools or managing integrations. GitLab claims this consolidation reduces cycle time and lets teams focus on shipping software rather than maintaining toolchain plumbing.
Why Investors Backed the Round
Goldman Sachs had already invested in GitLab in 2018 and cited internal results as a driver for doubling down. James Hayward from Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division stated:
“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 GitLab’s growth and customer reach and look forward to supporting the company as it goes from strength to strength.”
James Hayward, Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division
ICONIQ Capital General Partner Matthew Jacobson framed the investment around market opportunity:
“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. We believe the company is exceptionally well-positioned to improve the work of millions of developers and enhance the way they build great products.”
Matthew Jacobson, General Partner, ICONIQ Capital
Business Metrics at the Time of the Announcement
At the time of the Series E announcement, GitLab reported the following business and community metrics:
- 143% ARR growth rate year-over-year, according to Chief Revenue Officer Michael McBride.
- More than 100,000 organizations using GitLab, including Ask Media Group, Charter Communications, Delta Air Lines, Goldman Sachs, Nvidia, and Ticketmaster.
- More than 4,800 active open-source contributors to the platform.
- An average of 180 improvements per monthly release.
- Support for over 100 community meetups across 20 countries in the preceding three quarters, with approximately 5,500 meetup members.
- The company had grown from fewer than 10 employees in 2015 to more than 800 team members spread across 55+ countries, with plans to hire over 200 more.
How GitLab Plans to Use the Funding
GitLab outlined several strategic priorities for deploying the capital:
- Platform development: Expanding capabilities in monitoring, project planning, and security — areas that round out the complete DevOps lifecycle within a single application.
- Hiring: Scaling headcount across product, engineering, marketing, sales, and administrative functions to support rapid customer growth.
- IPO preparation: GitLab signaled at the time of the announcement that it was planning to go public in 2020.
CEO and co-founder Sid Sijbrandij commented on the company’s direction:
“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. This funding will help more organizations experience the benefits of this unified DevOps experience.”
Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO, GitLab
Customer Perspective: Nvidia on Running GitLab at Scale
Kevin Sage, SCM Manager at Nvidia, described the platform’s operational value for a large enterprise engineering organization:
“GitLab provides us with a very stable, scalable, modern solution. 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 transparently to our users is a huge benefit. 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. 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.”
Kevin Sage, SCM Manager, Nvidia
Community and Conference Momentum
Alongside the funding news, GitLab highlighted its inaugural user conference, GitLab Commit, held in Brooklyn, where enterprise customers were scheduled to present their DevOps transformation results. A follow-up event in London was planned for October 2019 to spotlight EMEA-based customers.
The combination of a strong open-source contributor community, rapid ARR growth, and a diverse institutional investor roster positioned GitLab as one of the more closely watched pre-IPO enterprise software companies heading into 2020.