GitLab, a San Francisco-based software startup founded by Ukrainian entrepreneur Dmitry Zaporozhets and Dutch-born Sid Sijbrandij, made its debut today on the Nasdaq at a valuation of $11 billion.
Priced at $77 late Wednesday, the ‘GTLB’ stock opened this Thursday at $94.25, pushing GitLab’s market cap to $13.5 billion, reports CNBC. This is about 58 times annualized revenue, which would put the company at the fifth place among 58 companies in the Bessemer Cloud Index.
GitLab raised some $650 million in the offering. Over $150 million of additional stock were purchased from an entity affiliated with Sijbrandij.
Using the DevOps application software development methodology, the GitLab platform is designed to “maximize the overall return on software development” within organizations. It delivers software “faster and efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance.”
“With GitLab, every team in your organization can collaboratively plan, build, secure, and deploy software to drive business outcomes faster with complete transparency, consistency and traceability,” the company claims.
GitLab offers an open source license which can be run without a commercial subscription, but provides only access to the open source features.
The company’s revenue jumped to $58 million in Q2 2021, up 69% from a year earlier. A net loss of $40.2 million was recorded in the latest quarter, as the company spends around 75% of its revenue on sales and marketing, according to CNBC.
GitLab started as open source project in Ukraine in 2011. Two years later, Zaporozhets and Sijbrandij started bootstrapping GitLab as a company.
Incorporated in 2014, the company went through Y Combinator in early 2015. It secured several rounds of funding in the following years, including a $100 million capital infusion in 2018 and a $268 million Series E round in 2019, which valued the company at $2.75 billion.
In November 2020 GitLab saw its valuation jump to $6 billion as it organized a $195 million secondary sale.
