Sid Sijbrandij
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GitLab raises $195M in secondary funding on $6B valuation
GitLab has confirmed with TechCrunch that it raised a $195 million secondary round on a $6 billion valuation. CNBC broke the story earlier today.
The company’s impressive valuation comes after its most recent 2019 Series E in which it raised $268 million on a 2.75 billion valuation, an increase of $3.25 billion in under 18 months. Company co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij believes the increase is due to his company’s progress adding functionality to the platform.
“We believe the increase in valuation over the past year reflects the progress of our complete DevOps platform towards realizing a greater share of the growing, multi-billion dollar software development market,” he told TechCrunch.
While the startup has raised over $434 million, this round involved buying employee stock options, a move that allows the company’s workers to cash in some of their equity prior to going public. CNBC reported that the firms buying the stock included Alta Park, HMI Capital, OMERS Growth Equity, TCV and Verition.
The next logical step would appear to be IPO, something the company has never shied away from. In fact, it actually at one point included the proposed date of November 18, 2020 as a target IPO date on the company wiki. While they didn’t quite make that goal, Sijbrandij still sees the company going public at some point. He’s just not being so specific as in the past, suggesting that the company has plenty of runway left from the last funding round and can go public when the timing is right.
“We continue to believe that being a public company is an integral part of realizing our mission. As a public company, GitLab would benefit from enhanced brand awareness, access to capital, shareholder liquidity, autonomy and transparency,” he said.
He added, “That said, we want to maximize the outcome by selecting an opportune time. Our most recent capital raise was in 2019 and contributed to an already healthy balance sheet. A strong balance sheet and business model enables us to select a period that works best for realizing our long-term goals.”
GitLab has not only published IPO goals on its Wiki, but its entire company philosophy, goals and OKRs for everyone to see. Sijbrandij told TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm at a TechCrunch Disrupt panel in September that he believes that transparency helps attract and keep employees. It doesn’t hurt that the company was and remains a fully remote organization, even pre-COVID.
“We started [this level of] transparency to connect with the wider community around GitLab, but it turned out to be super beneficial for attracting great talent as well,” Sijbrandij told Wilhelm in September.
The company, which launched in 2014, offers a DevOps platform to help move applications through the programming lifecycle.
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Hear how to scale to $100M ARR at Disrupt 2020
At Disrupt this year TechCrunch is digging into the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold. To help us explore the software revenue milestone, we’re bringing in a number of CEOs that have already reached it: Egnyte’s Vineet Jain, GitLab’s Sid Sijbrandij and Kaltura’s Michal Tsur.
Join us on the Extra Crunch stage to hear this session, along with several other sessions around how founders can navigate the choppy startup waters. You can snag a ticket here.
The modern software world, often called software as a service, or SaaS, operates against a well-defined set of inflection points. These include $1 million ARR, a key moment for startups looking to raise their first Series-defined round of capital; the $10 million ARR mark, at which point the same companies become hard to kill; and $100 million ARR, at which point startups can start to prep for a public offering, or regular, large capital raises from private investors.
It’s that last milestone we want to explore. With three executives from companies that we’ve included in our series on $100 million ARR companies, we’ll dig into what they had to learn the hard way as they grew to material business scale, what went well and what they might be able to share with startups that aspire to a similar level of success.
That we’ll be hosting the conversation during a mini-IPO wave will make it all the more exciting; these three business leaders will certainly have at least one eye on the public markets. And as we’ll have the chat in the shadow of COVID-19, we’ll learn about how the highly valued private companies have had to adapt to a changed economic environment and working setup.
We’ll lean into lessons, learnings and other operational questions with the CEO of Egnyte, an enterprise content and management service provider; the CEO of GitLab, a DevOps company that has long had a distributed-employee model that is incredibly pertinent to the current moment; and the president of Kaltura, a software company that powers online video for other companies.
Since TechCrunch started compiling a list of companies that had either reached $100 million ARR, or were on their way, we’ve collected dozens of firms to the list. The three we’re talking to are among the most interesting. At a minimum, the conversation should be an interesting look into the next set of leaders in the software and startup space. See you there.
You can read our entries from the $100 million ARR series on each firm below:
Disrupt is happening for five action-packed days — September 14-18 — and if you want to partake in this session (or any other session on the Extra Crunch stage), you’ll need to get your Digital Pro Pass for just $345 for a limited time. Or if you are a founder, showcase your startup in Digital Startup Alley for just $445 for you PLUS another member of your team. Get your pass today!
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