Code Sharing Company GitLab Soars in its NASDAQ Debut

It was this week that GitLab began to trade on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “GTLB.”

The code-sharing company’s shares had an amazing start after it priced its IPO above the expected range. It raised about $650 million in its IPO, and investors bought additional stock from an entity tied to CEO Sid Sijbrandij.

Shares soared 35% on the first day of trading on Thursday.

The company, whose code-sharing software competes with Microsoft’s GitHub, priced its stock at $77 late Wednesday, valuing the company at about $11 billion.

GitLab had said it would likely sell shares at $66 to $69 each. The stock then opened closed at $103.89, pushing GitLab’s market cap to $14.9 billion

Gitlab offers a free version of what the company refers to as its DevOps platform. The term references the combination of developers and IT operations. The software allows users to work on code, package it, release it and monitor it. Customers can run it in any public cloud, their own data center or as a GitLab-hosted service.

The company makes money from its premium products where for $19 a month per user, GitLab includes tools for enterprises and faster code reviews, and for $99 a month, users get features like security and compliance.

According to the company’s prospectus, some 383 customers are spending at least $100,000 a year, GitLab said in its prospectus.

Our future success depends, in part, on our ability to convert users of our free product offering into paying customers by selling additional products, and by upselling additional subscription services,” GitLab said.

The company has 1,350 employees operating in more than 65 countries. In the header of its prospectus, Gitlab says “address not applicable.”

Co-founder Sijbrandij is the company’s largest stakeholder, with 19% ownership before the offering, according to the prospectus. Khosla Ventures owns 14%, followed by ICONIQ at about 12%,
Capital at 11% and GV (formerly Google Ventures) at just under 7%.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.