GitLab has raised $20 million from U.S. investment banking firm Goldman Sachs in its latest investment round, the tech startup announced on Dec.4.
Goldman has invested in GitLab just months after the software startup with Ukrainian roots announced a mega investment round led by Mark Zuckerberg’s personal money managing firm Iconiq Capital. As a result of that round, GitLab raised $100 million and was valued at $1.1 billion.
Goldman’s $20 million investment round is the sixth so far for GitLab, and brought its external funding to a total of $145 million.
GitLab is a software developer platform that allows large groups of programmers to all work on the same piece of software at the same time. Goldman started using GitLab internally in early 2018, and its engineers loved it so much that they insisted the banking company should invest in the startup, which was originally founded by Ukrainian Dmitriy Zaporozhets back in 2011.
According to Sid Sijbrandij, the CEO of GitLab, the involvement of the bank’s tech people makes the agreement “special.”
“That’s because it’s (Goldman’s) actual engineering team that said ‘we want to invest in this,’” Sijbrandij told Business Insider. “They were so happy as a customer that they were like, yes, this is the future.”
Sijbrandij said the funding would be used to ensure GitLab is “the best in the class” in each of the product categories it competes in. GitLab is seen as a leading upstart rival to GitHub, the code-sharing company that Microsoft bought for $7.5 billion this year.
To achieve that, GitLab will double its headcount over the next year, after already doubling its staff in 2018. GitLab has no office — its current 350 employees are scattered across 45 countries.
There’s another benefit for GitLab from this agreement — Goldman will now advise the startup on how to shape its tools for the compliance needs of financial institutions. In exchange, the bank will get new tools built to suit its needs.
Over the seven years of its existence, GitLab has gained popularity among programmers and attracted attention from the corporate world — modern organizations rely on software and need a place to write, share and store code.
Today 100,000 firms use GitLab, including heavyweights like IBM, Sony, Alibaba, SpaceX; and the world’s leading science organizations, NASA and CERN.
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