GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a

DevOps DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (''Dev'') and IT operations (''Ops''). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary to ...

software package which can develop, secure, and operate software. The

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Dutch developer Sytse Sijbrandij. In 2018, GitLab Inc. was considered the first partly-Ukrainian

unicorn The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead. In European literature and art, the unicorn has for the last thousand years o ...

. Since its foundation, GitLab Inc. promoted remote work, and is known to be among the largest all-remote companies in the world. GitLab has an estimated 30 million registered users, with 1 million being active licensed users.

Overview

GitLab Inc. was established in 2014 to continue the development of the open-source code-sharing platform launched in 2011 by Dmitriy Zaporozhets. The company's other co-founder Sytse Sijbrandij initially contributed to the project and, by 2012, decided to build a business around it. GitLab offers its platform as a freemium. Since its foundation, GitLab Inc. has been an all-remote company. By 2020, the company employed 1300 people in 65 countries. Until 2019, the company used a no-vetting policy for customers (except when required by law) and banned political discussions in the workplace but relaxed the restrictions in response to criticism.

History

The company is Alumnus of the

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

seed accelerator Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often g ...

Winter 2015 program. Customers as of 2015 included Alibaba Group and IBM. In January 2017, a database administrator accidentally deleted the production database in the aftermath of a

cyber attack A cyberattack is any offensive maneuver that targets computer information systems, computer networks, infrastructures, or personal computer devices. An attacker is a person or process that attempts to access data, functions, or other restricted ...

, causing the loss of a substantial amount of issue and merge request data. The recovery process was

live-streamed Livestreaming is streaming media simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real-time over the internet. It is often referred to simply as streaming. Non-live media such as video-on-demand, vlogs, and YouTube videos are technically streamed, but no ...

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

. In April 2018, GitLab Inc. announced integration with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to simplify the process of spinning up a new cluster to deploy applications. In May 2018, GNOME moved to GitLab with over 400 projects and 900 contributors. On August 1, 2018, GitLab Inc. started development of Meltano. On August 11, 2018, GitLab Inc. moved from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud Platform, making the service inaccessible to users in

Crimea Crimea, crh, Къырым, Qırım, grc, Κιμμερία / Ταυρική, translit=Kimmería / Taurikḗ ( ) is a peninsula in Ukraine, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. It has a pop ...

Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu (Amnok) and T ...

, Sudan, and Syria, due to sanctions imposed by Office of Foreign Assets Control of the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

. To overcome this issue, the non-profit organisation

Framasoft Framasoft is a popular education social network created in November 2001 by , Paul Lunetta, and Georges Silva. Since 2014, it is supported by a nonprofit organization of the same name based in Lyon, France. Mainly focused on free software valori ...

provides a Debian mirror to make ''GitLab CE'' available in these countries. In 2021, OMERS participated in a secondary shares investment in GitLab Inc. During the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...

in 2020, GitLab Inc. released its Guide to All-Remote and a Coursera course on remote management to aid companies in building all-remote work cultures. April 2020 saw the expansion of GitLab Inc. into the Australian and Japanese markets. In November that same year, GitLab Inc. was valued at more than $6 billion in a secondary market evaluation. On June 2, 2021, GitLab Inc. also acquired UnReview, a tool that automates software review cycles. On June 30, 2021, GitLab Inc.

spun out ''Spun Out'' is a Canadian television sitcom created by Jeff Biederman, Brent Piaskoski and Brian K. Roberts for CTV. It premiered on March 6, 2014 and ended on October 3, 2015, with a total of 26 episodes over the course of 2 seasons. Premise T ...

Meltano, an open source ELT platform. On March 18, 2021, GitLab Inc. licensed its technology to Chinese company JiHu. On July 23, 2021, GitLab Inc. open-sourced Package Hunter, a Falco-based tool that detects malicious code. On August 4, 2022, it became known that GitLab plans to change its Data Retention Policy and automatically delete inactive repositories that have not been modified for a year. With this, GitLab drew criticism from the open source community. Shortly after, it was announced that dormant projects would not be deleted, and would instead remain accessible in an archived state, potentially using a slower type of storage.

Fundraising

GitLab Inc. initially raised $1.5 million in

seed funding Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' su ...

. Subsequent funding rounds include: * September 2015 - $4 million in

Series A A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exc ...

funding from

Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most successf ...

. * September 2016 - $20 million in Series B funding from

August Capital August Capital, legally August Capital Master Management Company, LLC, is a venture capital firm founded by David Marquardt and John Johnston in 1995. It is focused on information technology and is based in Menlo Park, California. Company Aug ...

and others. * October 2016 - $20 million in Series C funding from GV and others. * September 19, 2018 - $100 million in Series D-round funding led by ICONIQ Capital. * 2019 - $268 million in Series E-round funding led by Goldman Sachs and ICONIQ Capital at a valuation of $2.7 billion.

IPO

On September 17, 2021, GitLab Inc. publicly filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market ...

(SEC) relating to the proposed

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

of its Class A common stock. The firm began trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker "GTLB" on October 14, 2021.

Acquisitions

In March 2015, GitLab Inc. acquired Gitorious, a competing

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

hosting service. Gitorious had at the time around 822,000 registered users. Users were encouraged to move to GitLab, and the Gitorious service was discontinued in June 2015. On March 15, 2017, GitLab Inc. announced the acquisition of Gitter. Included in the announcement was the stated intent that Gitter would continue as a standalone project. Additionally, GitLab Inc. announced that the code would become open source under an

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

no later than June 2017. In January 2018, GitLab Inc. acquired Gemnasium, a service that provided security scanners with alerts for known security vulnerabilities in open-source libraries of various languages. The service was scheduled for complete shut-down on May 15. Gemnasium features and technology was integrated into GitLab EE and as part of CI/CD. On June 11, 2020, GitLab Inc. acquired Peach Tech, a security software firm specializing in protocol fuzz testing, and Fuzzit. On December 14, 2021, GitLab Inc. announced that it had acquired Opstrace, Inc., an open source observability distribution.

Application

GitLab's application offers functionality to collaboratively plan, build, secure, and deploy software as a complete DevOps Platform. GitLab is scalable and can be hosted on-premises or on cloud storage. It also includes a

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

, issue-tracking, IDE, and CI/ CD pipeline features. GitLab, like

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

, also offers a free GitLab Pages product for hosting static webpages, with optional Let's Encrypt for HTTPS support since version 12.1.

References

External links

* {{Bug tracking systems 2021 initial public offerings 500 Startups companies Bug and issue tracking software Build automation Collaborative projects Concurrent Versions System Continuous integration Cross-platform free software Distributed version control systems Free project management software Free software companies Free software programmed in Ruby Free version control software Git (software) Go (programming language) software Open-source hosted development tools Open-source software hosting facilities Project hosting websites Remote companies Software using the MIT license Technology companies of the Netherlands Y Combinator companies Companies listed on the Nasdaq