.svg){kind=link}
The story
Founded by Dmitriy Zaporozhets in 2011.1
In June 2015, the company was changed to a United States corporation.
The company participated in the YCombinator seed accelerator Winter 2015 program. By 2015, notable customers included Alibaba Group and IBM.
In January 2017, a database administrator accidentally deleted the production database in the aftermath of a cyberattack, causing the loss of a substantial amount of issue data and merge request data. The recovery process was live-streamed on YouTube.
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.
In June 2020, KDE moved to GitLab with over 2,600 projects and 2,700 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 several regions including: Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, due to sanctions imposed by Office of Foreign Assets Control of the United States. In order to overcome this limitation, the non-profit organization Framasoft began providing a Debian mirror to make GitLab CE available in those countries.
Read the full text
In 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, GitLab Inc. released "GitLab's Guide to All-Remote" as well as a course on remote management for the purpose of aiding companies interested in building all-remote work cultures. In April, the company expanded into the Australian and Japanese markets. By November, it was valued at more than $6 billion in a secondary market evaluation.
In 2021, OMERS participated in a secondary shares investment in GitLab Inc.
On March 18, 2021, GitLab Inc. licensed its technology to the Chinese company JiHu.
On June 30, 2021, GitLab Inc. spun out Meltano, an open source ELT platform.
On July 23, 2021, GitLab Inc. released its software Package Hunter, a Falco-based tool that detects malicious code, under the open-source MIT Licence.
On August 4, 2022, GitLab announced its plans for changing its Data Retention Policy and for automatically deleting inactive repositories which have not been modified for a year. As a result, in the following days GitLab received much 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.
In May 2023, the company launched the "GitLab 16.0" platform as an AI-driven DevSecOps solution. It contained over 55 new features and enhancements.
In July 2024, Reuters reported that GitLab was exploring a potential sale after attracting acquisition interest, with cloud monitoring firm Datadog named as one of the interested parties.
In 2026, GitLab Inc. had over 10 thousand paying customers paying at least 5000 $/year, an increase of 8 % year-on-year.
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.
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 Form S-1 registration statement for the initial public offering of its Class A common stock. The stock began trading on NASDAQ under the ticker "GTLB" on October 14, 2021. The IPO raised $650 million for the company.
From Wikipedia’s article on GitLab Inc., shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4