GitLab gets it, grabs $100m to become $1bn firm

Code repository and DevOps outfit, GitLab, has tipped into the $1bn club thanks to a $100m injection of funding from ICONIQ Capital.

GitLab had previously pocketed $20m from GV in October 2017 as it strove to move on from just stashing source code for devs that either didn’t want to use GitHub or just couldn’t spell it. The San Francisco-based outfit has wanted in on the whole DevOps chain.

The “Complete DevOps” vision hasn’t come cheap, and GitLab said it intends to burn through its fresh pile of cash to become best in class from planning to monitoring by providing enterprises an alternative to having to integrate multiple tools such as Jira, GitHub and Jenkins while also avoiding locking users into a particular cloud provider.

Of the investment, GitLab's co-founder and CEO, Sid Sijbrandij, told Reuters: “This should probably be the last one before the company’s IPO on November 18, 2020.”

GitLab flung out its Auto DevOps application, which takes care of the tedious work of building, testing, deploying and monitoring, in June. The company has claimed an average acceleration in the DevOps lifecycle of “200 per cent”.

The software repo planned to bring Auto DevOps to all of its customers by 22 September – after all, it likes to default every setting to On (but will turn it off automatically if a pipeline fails).

It has had a chequered past, suffering an embarrassing outage in 2017 after an employee accidentally deleted production data and found restoring from backups… challenging. It suffered performance issues back in April after accidentally triggering a database failover.

However, while GitLab may have had its struggles, it also enjoyed an uptick in usage following the acquisition by Microsoft of fellow code shack GitHub, when some developers jumped ship. Although not quite at the lofty valuation of $7.5bn placed by Microsoft on its new baby, cresting $1bn is a milestone not to be sniffed at. ®

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