GitLab Inc. is an
open-core company that operates GitLab, a
DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (''Dev'') and IT operations (''Ops''). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary to ...
software package which can develop, secure, and operate software.
The
open source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...
project was created by
Ukrainian
Ukrainian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Ukraine
* Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe
* Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine
* So ...
developer Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Dutch developer Sytse Sijbrandij.
In 2018, GitLab Inc. was considered the first partly-Ukrainian
unicorn
The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead.
In European literature and art, the unicorn has for the last thousand years o ...
.
Since its foundation, GitLab Inc. promoted
remote work
Remote work, also called work from home (WFH), work from anywhere, telework, remote job, mobile work, and distance work is an employment arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work, such as an office building, ware ...
,
and is known to be among the largest all-remote companies in the world. GitLab has an estimated 30 million registered users, with 1 million being active licensed users.
Overview
GitLab Inc. was established in 2014 to continue the development of the open-source code-sharing platform launched in 2011 by Dmitriy Zaporozhets. The company's other co-founder Sytse Sijbrandij initially contributed to the project and, by 2012, decided to build a business around it.
GitLab
offers its platform as a
freemium
Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium," is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical (o ...
.
Since its foundation, GitLab Inc. has been an all-remote company. By 2020, the company employed 1300 people in 65 countries.
Until 2019, the company used a no-vetting policy for customers (except when required by law) and banned political discussions in the workplace but relaxed the restrictions in response to criticism.
History
The company is
Alumnus
Alumni (singular: alumnus (masculine) or alumna (feminine)) are former students of a school, college, or university who have either attended or graduated in some fashion from the institution. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for grou ...
of the
Y Combinator
Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...
seed accelerator
Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often g ...
Winter 2015 program. Customers as of 2015 included
Alibaba Group and
IBM.
In January 2017, a database administrator accidentally deleted the production database in the aftermath of a
cyber attack
A cyberattack is any offensive maneuver that targets computer information systems, computer networks, infrastructures, or personal computer devices. An attacker is a person or process that attempts to access data, functions, or other restricted ...
, causing the loss of a substantial amount of issue and merge request data. The recovery process was
live-streamed
Livestreaming is streaming media simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real-time over the internet. It is often referred to simply as streaming. Non-live media such as video-on-demand, vlogs, and YouTube videos are technically streamed, but no ...
on
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
.
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
A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...
moved to GitLab with over 400 projects and 900 contributors.
On August 1, 2018, GitLab Inc. started development of Meltano.
On August 11, 2018, GitLab Inc. moved from
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...
to
Google Cloud Platform, making the service inaccessible to users in
Crimea
Crimea, crh, Къырым, Qırım, grc, Κιμμερία / Ταυρική, translit=Kimmería / Taurikḗ ( ) is a peninsula in Ukraine, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. It has a pop ...
,
Cuba
Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...
,
Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
,
North Korea
North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu River, Y ...
,
Sudan
Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...
, and
Syria
Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...
, due to sanctions imposed by
Office of Foreign Assets Control
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the U.S. Treasury Department. It administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions in support of U.S. national security and foreign policy ob ...
of the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
.
To overcome this issue, the non-profit organisation
Framasoft
Framasoft is a popular education social network created in November 2001 by , Paul Lunetta, and Georges Silva. Since 2014, it is supported by a nonprofit organization of the same name based in Lyon, France. Mainly focused on free software valori ...
provides a Debian mirror to make ''GitLab CE'' available in these countries.
In 2021, OMERS participated in a secondary shares investment in GitLab Inc.
During the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...
in 2020, GitLab Inc. released its Guide to All-Remote and a Coursera course on remote management to aid companies in building all-remote work cultures.
April 2020 saw the expansion of GitLab Inc. into the Australian and Japanese markets. In November that same year, GitLab Inc. was valued at more than $6 billion in a secondary market evaluation.
On June 2, 2021, GitLab Inc. also acquired UnReview, a tool that automates software review cycles.
On June 30, 2021, GitLab Inc.
spun out
''Spun Out'' is a Canadian television sitcom created by Jeff Biederman, Brent Piaskoski and Brian K. Roberts for CTV. It premiered on March 6, 2014 and ended on October 3, 2015, with a total of 26 episodes over the course of 2 seasons.
Premise
T ...
Meltano, an open source
ELT platform.
On March 18, 2021, GitLab Inc. licensed its technology to Chinese company JiHu.
On July 23, 2021, GitLab Inc. open-sourced Package Hunter, a Falco-based tool that detects malicious code.
On August 4, 2022, it became known that GitLab plans to change its Data Retention Policy and automatically delete inactive repositories that have not been modified for a year. With this, GitLab drew 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.
Fundraising
GitLab Inc. initially raised $1.5 million in
seed funding
Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' su ...
.
Subsequent funding rounds include:
* September 2015 - $4 million in
Series A
A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exc ...
funding from
Khosla Ventures
Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most successf ...
.
* September 2016 - $20 million in Series B funding from
August Capital
August Capital, legally August Capital Master Management Company, LLC, is a venture capital firm founded by David Marquardt and John Johnston in 1995. It is focused on information technology and is based in Menlo Park, California.
Company
Aug ...
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
Goldman Sachs () is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered at 200 West Street in Lower Manhattan, with regional headquarters in London, Warsaw, Bangalore, H ...
and
ICONIQ Capital at a valuation of $2.7 billion.
IPO
On September 17, 2021, GitLab Inc. publicly filed a registration statement on
Form S-1
Form S-1 is an SEC filing used by companies planning on going public to register their securities with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as the "registration statement by the Securities Act of 1933". The S-1 contains the basic ...
with the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market ...
(SEC) relating to the proposed
initial public offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
of its Class A common stock. The firm began trading on the
NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker "GTLB" on October 14, 2021.
Acquisitions
In March 2015, GitLab Inc. acquired
Gitorious
Gitorious was a free and open source web application for hosting collaborative free and open-source software development projects using Git revision control. Although it was freely available to be downloaded and installed, it was written primar ...
, a competing
Git
Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...
hosting service.
Gitorious had at the time around 822,000 registered users.
Users were encouraged to move to GitLab, and the Gitorious service was discontinued in June 2015.
On March 15, 2017, GitLab Inc. announced the acquisition of
Gitter
Gitter is an open-source software, open-source instant messaging and chat room system for developers and users of GitLab and GitHub repositories. Gitter is provided as software-as-a-service, with a free option providing all basic features and the ...
. Included in the announcement was the stated intent that Gitter would continue as a standalone project. Additionally, GitLab Inc. announced that the code would become open source under an
MIT License
The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...
no later than June 2017.
In January 2018, GitLab Inc. acquired Gemnasium, a service that provided security scanners with alerts for known security vulnerabilities in open-source libraries of various languages. The service was scheduled for complete shut-down on May 15. Gemnasium features and technology was integrated into GitLab EE and as part of
CI/CD
In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD is the combined practices of continuous integration (CI) and (more often) continuous delivery or (less often) continuous deployment (CD).
Comparison
* Continuous integration: Frequent merging of several ...
.
On June 11, 2020, GitLab Inc. acquired Peach Tech, a security software firm specializing in protocol fuzz testing, and Fuzzit.
On December 14, 2021, GitLab Inc. announced that it had acquired Opstrace, Inc., an open source observability distribution.
Application
![Gitlab-14](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Gitlab-14.3.0-pre-issue-tracker-08-25-21.png)
GitLab's application offers functionality to collaboratively plan, build, secure, and deploy software as a complete DevOps Platform.
GitLab is scalable and can be hosted
on-premises
On-premises software (abbreviated to on-prem, and incorrectly referred to as on-premise) is installed and runs on computers on the premises of the person or organization using the software, rather than at a remote facility such as a server farm ...
or on
cloud storage
Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, said to be on "the cloud". The physical storage spans multiple servers (sometimes in multiple locations), and the physical environment is t ...
. It also includes a
wiki
A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...
,
issue-tracking, IDE, and
CI/
CD pipeline features.
GitLab, like
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...
, also offers a free GitLab Pages product for hosting
static webpages, with optional
Let's Encrypt
Let's Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority run by Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) that provides X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption at no charge. It is the world's largest certificate authority, used ...
for HTTPS support since version 12.1.
See also
*
Comparison of source-code-hosting facilities
A source-code-hosting facility (also known as forge) is a file archive and web hosting facility for source code of software, documentation, web pages, and other works, accessible either publicly or privately. They are often used by open-source ...
*
Collaborative software
Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them".
As re ...
*
Gitea
Gitea () is a forge software package for hosting software development version control using Git as well as other collaborative features like bug tracking, code review, kanban boards, tickets, and wikis. It supports self-hosting but also pr ...
*
Kubernetes
Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...
References
External links
*
{{Bug tracking systems
2021 initial public offerings
500 Startups companies
Bug and issue tracking software
Build automation
Collaborative projects
Concurrent Versions System
Continuous integration
Cross-platform free software
Distributed version control systems
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Free version control software
Git (software)
Go (programming language) software
Open-source hosted development tools
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Project hosting websites
Remote companies
Software using the MIT license
Technology companies of the Netherlands
Y Combinator companies
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