GitLab Raises $20 Million Series B Funding

GitLab, which offers Git repository management and collaboration software, announced it has secured $20 million in a Series B funding round. Investors August Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Y Combinator are helping the company fund the next items on its roadmap, which includes issues, wikis, code review, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery.

In conjunction with the funding announcement, GitLab introduced its new “Master Plan” product direction, which aims to put a more “Conversational Development” approach into the company’s tools. The idea is to go from idea to production with a single interface, instead of managing the burden of using tools from many different platforms.

“We are seeing a shift in the landscape as the disparate tools that were designed to enable collaboration and speed up development are actually slowing down the enterprise development process,” co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij said. “While many tools exist to serve each stage of the the development lifecycle, we believe an integrated set of open source tools is the best way to deliver Conversational Development.”

GitLab’s new infusion of capital gives the company the opportunity to work on more collaborative tools that will facilitate a seamless experience of bringing ideas to life. The software is currently used by more than 100,000 organizations, such as IBM, NASA, and Sony, and GitLab.com hosts over 1 million projects.

Although GitLab is a distributed organization, the company moved from the Netherlands to San Francisco last year, since the majority of its customers are headquartered in North America. The move also gave the company “a presence close to Silicon Valley,” which seems to be paying off, as GitLab has now managed to rake in $25.6 million total in funding since its incorporation in 2014.

During the past year, the company has been actively courting open source project maintainers, following competitor GitHub’s sluggish response to customers’ frustrations with issue management and its pricing hike in May. As Git is now used by approximately 30% of enterprise developers, competition in the repository hosting space is increasing. GitLab has chosen to tailor its offerings to prioritize the needs of open source projects and the estimated 18 million developers who use open source software for their corporate infrastructure.