GitLab Files For Initial Public Offering After $6bn Valuation

GitLab, which makes a popular distributed coding platform, has filed the initial paperwork for a public offering on the Nasdaq exchange, the company said.

The firm said it has filed a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but didn’t indicate terms for the offering.

The lead underwriters are Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and BofA Securities.

GitLab was valued 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.

IPO plans

That was up substantially from a $2.7bn valuation in a late-2019 financing round.

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

Following the 2019 funding round the company had said it was considering alternative means for a listing, including a direct offering or acquisition by a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

The firm said in January it was seeing a surge in demand as more companies rely on software and digital tools to run their operations, with three major airlines and a travel management provider signing deals in 2020.

GitLab said at the time it reached $150m in annual recurring revenue and had grown 74 percent in its most recent quarter.

Revenue growth

In its IPO filing GitLab said it had generated $108.1m in revenues for the six months ended 31 July, up 69 percent year-on-year, with a net loss of $69m in the same period, up from $43.6m for the same period a year earlier.

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

GitLab has raised more than $400m in external funding to date, with large investors including Altimeter Capital, Franklin Templeton, TCV and Coatue Management.

Collaborative development

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