Blog Company Announcing $100 million in Series D round funding led by ICONIQ Capital
September 19, 2018
6 min read

Announcing $100 million in Series D round funding led by ICONIQ Capital

Today we announced $100M in new funding to beat nine best-in-class products with a single application.

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Today we are thrilled to announce our $100 million Series D funding led by ICONIQ Capital, bringing our valuation to over $1 billion and validating our position as the world’s first single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle. We’re elated that ICONIQ shares our vision of beating out nine other products with a single, best-in-class application that integrates each stage of the DevOps lifecycle. We plan to use the funding to become best-in-class in every DevOps software category from planning to monitoring. More than 100,000 organizations use GitLab to deploy to multiple clouds, implement cloud native architectures, and practice Concurrent DevOps. This results in a 200 percent faster DevOps lifecycle with unmatched visibility, higher levels of efficiency, and comprehensive governance.

“GitLab is emerging as a leader across the entire software development ecosystem by releasing software at a pace that is unmatched by any competitor. They’re taking the broad software development market head-on by developing an application that allows organizations to churn out software at an accelerated rate with cost and time savings.” - Matthew Jacobson, General Partner at ICONIQ Capital

Enterprises are facing a tool chain crisis, investing time and resources into piecing together disparate tools from different stages of the software development and operations lifecycle. A typical enterprise needs to integrate tools like VersionOne, Jira, GitHub, Jenkins, Artifactory, Electric Cloud, Puppet, New Relic, and BlackDuck. This causes poor visibility because data lives in so many different tools, slow cycle time because teams need to wait on each other, and bolted on security as an afterthought.

Our open core application, which has more than 2,000 contributors, is breaking down this barrier by building features for each stage of the DevOps lifecycle into a single application. This enables Concurrent DevOps, the ability for teams to manage, plan, create, verify, package, release, configure, monitor, and secure software together so they can have visibility into what matters, start without waiting, and ship with confidence.

“Our goal is to strive for less people managing processes and more automation within our workflow. GitLab does just that by eliminating the complicated web that tied all of our development tools together, so we now have a single, automated application that makes our team more efficient.” — Adam Dehnel, product architect, BI Worldwide

We started as source code management based on Git. But when announcing our series C last year, we voiced the ambition to grow beyond that to cover every product category of the DevOps lifecycle. Some features have already become best in class, like the continuous integration system that scored highest in the current offering category in The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Integration Tools, Q3 2017 report, and was recognized as a "Strong Performer" in The Forrester New Wave™ for Value Stream Management Tools, Q3 2018. With this latest funding round and the growing number of people contributing code to GitLab, we are well positioned for all of our features to become best-in-class.

“Two of the defining characteristics of modern application development are an open, collaborative process and toolchains that transcend individual product categories from planning out to operations. By marrying an open source development process to a comprehensive set of functional capabilities, GitLab aims to leverage those precise qualities in a single application that meets enterprises’ DevOps needs.” - Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk

“Since raising a Series C round last year, we’ve delivered on our commitment to bring a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle to market, and as a result have been able to reach over $1 billion in valuation. With this latest funding round, we will continue to improve upon our suite by building out our management, planning, packaging, monitoring and security features for a more robust DevOps application.” – Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab

GitLab is purpose-built for organizations that are undergoing a digital transformation. Our focus is on supporting organizations that are aiming for faster DevOps lifecycles, cloud native architectures, and multi-cloud deployments. Some of our recent product milestones include the release of Auto DevOps to accelerate the DevOps lifecycle by 200 percent, a Kubernetes integration so clusters can be spun up from within GitLab, and enhancements to the Web IDE to make code changes easier for everyone.

The latest round brings our valuation to over $1 billion and validates our position as the world’s first single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle. As other DevOps tools become locked in to a single cloud, our customers are embracing a multi-cloud future, so their tooling must be independent of any single cloud provider and work across on-premises, private and public clouds. Customers want their tooling to be consistent, whether they deploy it themselves or use it as a service.

“Deployments are no longer limited to a traditional software release cycle. Using GitLab-CI for our Continuous Deployments over-the-air, we have empowered the customer to be their own technician while increasing the rate at which software can be delivered.” - Chris Hill, head of systems engineering, next generation infotainment at Jaguar Land Rover.

We began in 2014 with a mission to change all creative work from read-only to read-write, so that everyone can contribute. Since then, our all-remote company has grown from fewer than 10 to more than 350 team members in over 40 countries across the globe. And we’re not slowing down – we’re still hiring for 77 positions!

We were recently recognized by Inc. Magazine as No. 44 out of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the United States. We attribute our success to our open core model and our value of transparency. We have an emphasis on co-creation and a commitment to open source – over 2,000 users and customers have contributed to GitLab’s code base. This philosophy helps build stronger customer relationships, which in turn result in a direct influence on feature updates to the product.

Get involved

We owe GitLab’s existence to your enthusiasm, drive, and hard work. Without our contributors’ belief in open source software, we would not be where we are today. We need your help to make our collective vision a reality. Everyone can contribute!

We are committed to standing by our promise to be good stewards of open source, and keeping communication and collaboration amongst the community a high priority.

To get started you can learn more about Concurrent DevOps, ready stories of how others are using GitLab, or visit our contribution guide.

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