By
Bena Ilyas
April 19th, 2024
Gitlabs just received $268 Million in Series E funding, which pushed startup’s valuation past $2.75B ahead of the planned IPO. Is remote working the new order of the day? How will its business model hold up post-IPO?
Technology innovation startup GitLab which operates fully remotely has raised $268 Million in series E funding ahead of the planned IPO. This was revealed on Tuesday the 17th of September by the company. This brings to $426 Million the total amount invested since 2015 and the $2.75 Billion the total valuation of the company which is more than twice the valuation when last year’s $100 Million series D funding took place. It was led by Goldman Sachs and Iconic Capital.
According to sources, GitLab has a wide range of investors who have backed it with considerable investments. Major investors include Blackrock, Franklin Templeton, Tiger Management, Light Street Capital, Alkeon Capital, Adage Capital Management, Altimeter Capital, Capital Group, Two Sigma Investments, and D1 Capital Partners.
According to the company’s website, the team has already indicated when exactly GitLab’s initial public offering will take place: 18th November 2020.
A Different Kind of Technology Startup
GitLab, by and large, has looked at issues differently. As one of the few startups to reach a valuation of such a value entirely remotely, they have been able to prove that a different kind of organization is emerging. One which is not dictated by the normal corporate culture of working the regular nine to five in corporate workspaces to turn a profit.
This has given rise to the lean startup which can achieve results on a global scale without the real estate commitments in terms of property ownership and lease. It also places focus on intellectual property rather than on physical property which is the new oil of the twenty-first century.
Considering its innovative service offerings of creating platforms for the development of in-house applications for organizations both large and small in real-time, GitLab which offers the free version but already has more than 10,000 paying clients seems to be the ideal startup of the 21st century.
DevOps to Become a Multibillion-Dollar Industry in Four Years
According to recent research, the DevOps industry was already said to be worth $3 Billion in 2017. This figure is said to increase to $10 Billion by 2023. This gives the indication that the big guns in finance are already watching the DevOps industry keenly and looking for how best to invest and turn a profit.
Already, Companies such as GitLabs with their recent evaluation and Github which was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 Billion indicate that this business model can work even with the many concerns of the open-source community.
Since most of such collaborative platforms are originally based on open source versions and their contributions are still fairly extensive, companies such as GitLab always ensure that the open-source community is given a chance to collaborate and contribute to future developments of the core platforms.