GitLab snags VC cash, promises to 'Git-ify' the world

GitLab has pledged to Git-ify the world – or at least make the term an acknowledged verb – after pulling in $20m to fund its plans for building an end-to-end dev collaboration suite.

The latest chunk'o’change brings its total funding to $25.6m, and founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij said the cash would be used to “accelerate development and adoption” of its products: “We want to be the first company to integrate and git-ify all the tools developers need.”

GitLab sees the software development process into a 10-step cycle, from initial idea, through development, testing, etc to production. A 12-step programme would be more catchy, but we suppose they don’t actually want to cure anyone of developing software.

CEO Sid Sijbrandij said each step or two steps constituted a potential discrete product, and the firm wanted to span collaboration across the entire cycle. The ultimate aim was a single super product, he continued. The firm has already integrated continuous integration into its platform. In August it shipped Issue Board. Its September release will target Deployment with spiced up Review functionality, and cycle analytics and an improved Slackbot to cover production are slated for later this year.

At the same time, there are certain bounds to GitLab’s ambitions - or at least how much of customers’ existing setup it can reasonably expect to displace. “We recognise there’s more out there, so we want to to play nice with what companies already have.”

“What’s outside our scope is the PAAS,” he said. “We won’t go into your production environments, we won’t do configuration.”

Something else outside its scope is blowing cash on a fancy corporate HQ. While it’s a cliché that once firms start spending more time building their HQ than their products, they’re in trouble, Gitlab has no corporate HQ at all, and its 100-plus staff are spread around the world. Which means Sijbrandij is now based in San Francisco; he only shares his digs with his wife and cat. “We don’t have any location where two people work.”

He admitted that this left some investors “sceptical” about the model, but insists, “When they saw the amazing people we were able to hire, that changed their mind.” ®