GitLab, the open-source code collaboration platform that competes with popular platform GitHub, announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, 500 Startups, Crunchfund, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, and Liquid 2 Ventures. The funding will enable the company to grow its U.S. operations, including the opening of a new office in San Francisco, CA.
“The GitLab team is thrilled to have such an experienced and respected group of investors,” said GitLab cofounder and CEO Sytse “Sid” Sijbrandij in a statement. “We started GitLab with a dream to become the default solution for developers to create better products together, faster. Enterprise technology is being replaced by open-source technology, and this seed round of funding will help us accelerate our growth and build our sales and marketing team in San Francisco to work more closely with current and new clients.”
A graduate of Y Combinator‘s winter 2015 program, GitLab operates very similarly to GitHub – the exception, however, is that GitLab offers a free, open-source edition of its core platform. Currently, the company has three product offerings: a Community Edition (its core platform offered under an open-source license); GitLab.com (a free SaaS version with limitless private repositories); and an Enterprise Edition (a premium version of its Git platform offered at subscription pricing).
More than 100,00 organizations and companies currently use GitLab, including the likes of NASA, CERN, Alibaba, SpaceX, O’Reilly, IBM, and Expedia. And the company had actually already been profitable prior to entering Y Combinator; this seed funding will help GitLab to accelerate its current growth.
