INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
GitLab is a company that doesn’t pull any punches or try to be coy
It actually has had a page on its website for some time stating it intends to go public on November 18, 2020
You don’t see that level of transparency from late-stage startups all that often
Today, the company announced a huge $268 million Series E on a tidy $2.75 billion valuation.Investors include Adage Capital Management,
Alkeon Capital, Altimeter Capital, Capital Group, Coatue Management, D1 Capital Partners, Franklin Templeton, Light Street Capital, Tiger
and Two Sigma Investments.The company seems to be primed and ready for that eventual IPO
Last year, GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij said that his CFO Paul Machle told him he wanted to begin planning to go public, and he
would need two years in advance to prepare the company
As Sijbrandij tells it, he told him to pick a date.“He said, I’ll pick the 16th of November because that’s the birthday of my twins
It’s also the last week before Thanksgiving, and after Thanksgiving, the stock market is less active, so that’s a good time to go
out,” Sijbrandij told TechCrunch.He said that he considered it a done deal and put the date on the GitLab Strategy page, a page that
outlines the company’s plans for everything it intends to do
It turned out that he was a bit too quick on the draw
Machle had checked the date in the interim and realized that it was a Monday, which is not traditionally a great day to go out, so they
decided to do it two days later
Now the target date is officially November 18, 2020.GitLab has the date it’s planning to go public listed on its Strategy page.As for that
$268 million, it gives the company considerable runway ahead of that planned event, but Sijbrandij says it also gives him flexibility in how
to take the company public
“One other consideration is that there are two options to go public
You can do an IPO or direct listing
We wanted to preserve the optionality of doing a direct listing next year
So if we do a direct listing, we’re not going to raise any additional money, and we wanted to make sure that this is enough in that
case,” he explained.Sijbrandij says that the company made a deliberate decision to be transparent early on
Being based on an open-source project, it’s sometimes tricky to make that transition to a commercial company, and sometimes that has a
negative impact on the community and the number of contributions
Transparency was a way to combat that, and it seems to be working.He reports that the community contributes 200 improvements to the GitLab
open-source product every month, and that’s double the amount of just a year ago, so the community is still highly active in spite of the
parent company’s commercial success.It did not escape his notice that Microsoft acquired GitHub last year for $7.5 billion
It’s worth noting that GitLab is a similar kind of company that helps developers manage and distribute code in a DevOps environment
He claims in spite of that eye-popping number, his goal is to remain an independent company and take this through to the next phase.“Our
ambition is to stay an independent company
And that’s why we put out the ambition early to become a listed company
That’s not totally in our control as the majority of the company is owned by investors, but as long as we’re more positive about the
future than the people around us, I think we can we have a shot at not getting acquired,” he said.The company was founded in 2014 and was
a member of Y Combinator in 2015
It has been on a steady growth trajectory ever since, hauling in more than $426 million
The last round before today’s announcement was a $100 million Series D last September.
