DevOps company GitLab said Tuesday that it has raised $268 million in a Series E round of funding, which brought its total valuation to $2.75 billion.
Driven by the increased demand from software developers, the team behind repository management project has raised a total of $425 million since its first funding round four years ago.
In addition to the founding round, which was led by existing investors Goldman Sachs and ICONIQ, along with participation from nine new investors, GitLab CEO and co-founder Sid Sijbrandij told several publications on Tuesday that his company has slated its IPO for November 18.
The latest funding round took place less than a year after GitLab's Series D round that raised $100 million. GitLab said it plans to use the additional funding to make all of its DevOps offerings, including monitoring, security and planning, best in class in order to help its enterprise customers bring their products to the market faster.
GitLab provides a free version of its platform for software developers, but it earns money though subscriptions for additional features and services. GitLab is primed to cash in on its DevOps portfolio as organizations have increasingly embraced software development practices that blend software development and information-technology operations to shorten the systems-development life cycle.
Taking a "DevOps" mindset allows enterprises to deliver new features, fixes, and updates at a faster rate and in close alignment with business objectives. Instead of working as separate IT teams, DevOps allows employees to work together to manage software development, testing and deployments.
GitLab said that with the DevOps market expected to triple by 2023—from $5.2 billion last year to $15 billion, according to IDC—the time was right to pursue additional funding.
“To be competitive today, companies need to be 10 times faster to market. We made an early bet that enterprises would benefit from a single application experience for DevOps teams to accelerate getting software products to market faster and more securely,” said Sijbrandij, in a statement. “I love hearing how our customers are innovating faster with a single DevOps application that enables dev, ops, and security to collaborate, and this funding will help more organizations experience the benefits of this unified DevOps experience.”
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GitLab's platform is used by more than 100,000 organizations, including Charter Communications, Goldman Sachs, Verizon and Nvidia. GitLab had fewer than 10 employees in 2015, but now it has more than 800 team members across 55 countries. GitLab is looking to hire an additional 200 employees.