GitLab Raises $800m In Successful Initial Public Offering

Shares in popular distributed coding platform GitLab opened about 22 percent above their offer price, during its initial public offering on Nasdaq on Thursday.

GitLab had filed the initial paperwork for a public offering on the Nasdaq exchange back in September, which had valued it at $6 billion (£4.4bn) after a secondary share sale in January that allowed employees to sell up to 20 percent of their vested equity.

Now Reuters has reported that because of the 22 percent share price rise, GitLab has now got a market capitalisation of $13.48 billion.

Successful IPO

The rise in the share price means the firm enjoyed a successful public listing, after the company’s stock opened at $94.25, compared with the initial public offering price of $77 per share.

GitLab sold 8.42 million shares in its IPO, and a selling stockholder affiliated with co-founder and CEO Sytse Sijbrandij also sold 1.98 million shares.

This means the IPO raised nearly $801 million in total.

The company, which counts as clients industry leaders such as Nvidia, Siemens and Goldman Sach, has a workforce of 1,350 across 65 countries, with all staff working remotely since the company was formed in 2014.

GitLab had previously said it planned to go public by November 2020, but put off those plans due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Collaborative development

The GitLab platform was initially created as a source code management system for software development teams.

It  later expanded into an integrated offering covering the software development lifecycle, and finally to cover the full DevOps lifecycle.

It is based on a repository manager for Git repositories, similar to competitors such as Microsoft-owned GitHub, SourceForge and Bitbucket.

All are based on Git, initially developed in 2005 for collaborative development of the Linux kernel.