GitLab started as a on-premises software where Dmitriy could put his repositories. Open-source; built by and for developers, our community grew quickly to hundreds of contributors world-wide.
Today, over a hundred thousands organizations are using GitLab to build software that puts people in space (NASA, SpaceX), helps discover new particles (CERN) and move computing forward (IBM, Qualcomm), among many others. These organizations and many individual contributors hack on, contribute and help GitLab become better every single day.
It is our goal to become the default solution for anyone building software and working together. The excitement and passion of our community has convinced us that open-source is the way forward. We want to accelerate our growth and expand operations so we can reach more people and build an even better GitLab.
In the effort to reach our goal, we are excited to announce that we have raised $1.5M in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, 500 Startups, Crunchfund, Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher), and Liquid 2 Ventures (Joe Montana).
Building an Open-Source Company
The popularity of GitLab as an open-source project made it possible to found a company. By selling support and later GitLab Enterprise Edition we were able to grow a company that was able to support GitLab for large enterprises by integrating with their own software, while still giving back to the community new features in every release of GitLab CE and a completely free hosted service in the form of GitLab.com .
These moves made it possible for the majority of our team to nerd-out in Silicon Valley at Y Combinator at the start of this year, where we learned a lot about business and growth, and got motivated by the enthusiasm and ambition of our batch-mates.
By now, we knew we wanted to go above and beyond what we had done so far and make GitLab bigger and better for everyone, which is why we've started working together with some amazing investors.
Vinod Khosla, founder and partner of Khosla Ventures said this about us:
“There’s a big market demand for more open-source solutions that allow engineers to create, review, and deploy code enabling their teams to build better products faster.”
“We invested in GitLab because it meets this demand by allowing engineers to more easily review each other’s work, collaborate, and merge good input, thereby accelerating the iterative process behind creating products.”
We're all very excited with this opportunity our investors have given us. It means we can accelerate growth and scale our US operations, which includes the recent opening of a new Experience Center in San Francisco (don't worry, we're still remote!).
Sytse "Sid" Sijbrandij, our CEO said:
“The GitLab team is thrilled to have such an experienced and respected group of investors. We started GitLab with a dream to become the default solution for developers to create better products together, faster."
"Enterprise technology is being replaced by open-source technology, and this seed round of funding will help us accelerate our growth and build our sales and marketing team in San Francisco to work more closely with current and new clients.”
Thank you for believing in us
We'd like to thank our amazing community that has contributed major features, bug fixes, documentation updates and more than we can ever return. We owe GitLab's existence to your enthusiasm, drive and hard work.
Thank you to our team, that has been working hard every single day and feels more like a highly distributed, international family than a company. We especially like to thank the core team members that are not with GitLab Inc: Nihad Abbasov, Robert Schilling, Hannes Rosenögger, Achilleas Pipinellis, Stan Hu, Jeroen van Baarsen and Drew Blessing.
And thank you to our investors for giving us trust and support in achieving our goals and vision.
It was a little more than a year ago that we were only dreaming about being a funded company. We're extremely excited and hopeful for the future of GitLab as an amazing tool to build products, as a community and as a company.
Want to help GitLab grow? We're looking for people to work with us!
