GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij at corporate event in London
GitLab
GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij, fresh off an employee stock sale that valued his software start-up at $ 6 billion, said he is still looking to make the company public, although he looks at many more options than were available in the past .
Sijbrandij on Thursday confirmed CNBC’s late November reporting of the company’s valuation in its secondary offering, allowing employees to sell up to 20% of their acquired assets. He provided additional details on the size of the deal and the investors, as well as revenue growth and new customers.
GitLab’s cloud-based software is used by developers to share code and collaborate on projects. The company, which competes with Microsoft’s GitHub and Atlassian, has seen tremendous demand as more industries rely on software and digital tools to run their businesses. GitLab specializes in helping coders speed up product updates, reduce operating costs and accelerate development.
GitLab reached $ 150 million in annual recurring revenue, Sijbrandij said, after growing 74% in the most recent quarter. In 2020, the company signed three major airlines and a travel management provider, even as the pandemic caused the travel industry to cut back drastically.
“It was the hardest hit industry last year and even they still bought,” said Sibrandij. “It has been a difficult year for many of our customers.”
In its “team handbook” on its website, GitLab had openly announced its plan to go public by November 2020. After the pandemic hit early last year and stirred the economy in general, the company scrapped the timing for its debut while indicating that a public mention was still on the roadmap.
Sijbrandij said he did the secondary to “give our team members the opportunity to take advantage of the value we’ve created together.” The valuation of $ 6 billion is up from $ 2.7 billion in a funding round in late 2019.
GitLab allowed current and former employees with equity acquired to sell a total of 4.9 million shares, bringing the total offering to $ 195 million. Investors who bought the stock included Alta Park, HMI Capital, OMERS Growth Equity, TCV and Verition. For the transaction, GitLab used Nasdaq Private Market, which specializes in helping private companies provide secondary liquidity.
Sijbrandij said there is no timetable for a public market debut, although people familiar with the issue told CNBC in November that it was likely to come in 2021. The company has a number of ways to consider going public that either didn’t exist or were relative. not tested before last year.
One option is a direct listing, the path of Spotify, Slack, Palantir and Asana followed by Roblox, which allows employees to immediately sell shares to new investors. Other companies such as Unity, Airbnb and DoorDash opted for a hybrid auction where management could choose a price based on bids. And there is the option of going public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), or a reverse merger performed by what is called a blank check entity.
“There are many more options and we follow the market,” says Sijbrandij. SPACs are an “interesting alternative that is also on our radar,” he said.
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