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 t ...

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. Op ...

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 Classical antiquity, antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn (anatomy), horn projecting from its forehead. In European literature and art, the unicor ...

. Since its foundation, GitLab Inc. promoted

remote work Remote work, also called work from home (WFH), work from anywhere, telework, remote job, mobile work, and distance work is an employment arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work, such as an office building, w ...

, 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 Alumni (singular: alumnus (masculine) or alumna (feminine)) are former students of a school, college, or university who have either attended or graduated in some fashion from the institution. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for grou ...

of the Y Combinator seed accelerator 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, causing the loss of a substantial amount of issue and merge request data. The recovery process was live-streamed on

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 most ...

. 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 p ...

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 Turkm ...

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 ...

, Sudan, and Syria, due to sanctions imposed by

Office of Foreign Assets Control The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the U.S. Treasury Department. It administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions in support of U.S. national security and foreign policy ...

of the

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. To overcome this issue, the non-profit organisation Framasoft 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 identified ...

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 Meltano, an open source

ELT ELT may refer to: Education * English language teaching * Expanded learning time, an American education strategy * Kolb's experiential learning theory Mathematics and science * Ending lamination theorem * Extremely large telescope, a type ...

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

. * September 2016 - $20 million in Series B funding from August Capital 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 (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 The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

under the ticker "GTLB" on October 14, 2021.

Acquisitions

In March 2015, GitLab Inc. acquired

Gitorious Gitorious was a free and open source web application for hosting collaborative free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software ...

, a competing Git 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 co ...

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 In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD is the combined practices of continuous integration (CI) and (more often) continuous delivery or (less often) continuous deployment (CD). Comparison * Continuous integration: Frequent merging of severa ...

. 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 Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, said to be on "the cloud". The physical storage spans multiple servers (sometimes in multiple locations), and the physical environment is ty ...

. 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 pu ...

, 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, co ...

, 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