Gitlab Listing – Opportunities for Indian Investors to Invest in Overseas Tech Companies

Exciting investment opportunities are emerging in the overseas market as high-quality software companies are hitting bourses for listing. Gitlab IPO made a debut at Nasdaq on 14th October 2021, issuing over 143 million shares priced of $77 per share. Shares jumped to 35% to $104.

Gitlab pioneered a new approach to Development and operations of software codes by building a platform, which consist of a single codebase and interface with a unified data model under its shared DevOps Platform. Today, every function within the company is dependent on the software and company needs to keep evolving digitally for surviving as well as remaining competitive which requires digital transformation as well as expertise in building software. GitLab’s single application brings together all the functions of the organisation e.g., operations & development, security, IT etc and related business teams for achieving the organisation digital objectives related to software development.

 Its platform allows various functional teams to collaborate their working and reduce the development lifecycle of software, i.e., on a fast and continuous basis from a slow and periodic basis by sourcing code management, continuous integration, testing, Packaging etc.

Proposed market size for the DevOps Platform is estimated to be approx. $40 billion. As per Gartner estimates, the market for Global Infrastructure Software is approx.  $328 billion by 2021 and $458 billion by 2024. Gitlab expects to serve $43 billion of this market by 2021 and $55 billion by 2024 respectively.

The growth strategy of Gitlab will focus on acquiring new customers, advancing feature maturity across stages of DevOps lifecycle, expansion within existing customer base, SaaS offering, expanding global footprints etc

Company is incorporated in State of Delaware and qualifies as an emerging growth company under Section 2(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, modified by the JOBS Act. As a result, the company is subjected to reduced disclosures which are otherwise applicable to companies outside the emerging growth company. This include exemption from auditor attestation compliance under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, executive compensation arrangements disclosures etc

The company process and store personal information due to which it is subjected to various stringent Governmental regulations e.g. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), U.K. General Data Protection Regulation, U.K. Data Protection Act 2018 etc. Outside United States, company plans to expand and  have overseas subsidiaries in Ireland,  , Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, , Japan, South Korea, Canada, Singapore, Australia, Germany and JV in China.

Company was founded in 2014.  It has no headquarters. Dmitriy Zaporozhets, created GitLab from his house in Ukraine without running water. GitLab’s chief executive, Sid Sijbrandij, based out of the Netherlands, partnered the project with a mission to ensure that everyone can contribute. Comoany have been a 100% remote workforce with approx. 1,350 team members in over 65 countries. Company has more than 3,000 individuals, who have contributed to The DevOps Platform and the developer pool who contributes to Gitlab codebase is bigger than the size of any single engineering organization. 

Company intends to use proceeds for working capital, general corporate purposes including product development, acquisition and investment in, technologies, solutions, and businesses.  Company has partnered with AWS, Google Cloud, Atlassian, RedHat and key national system integrators and resellers. In 2021 it has Reached more than 2,600 contributors.  It has 20  $1.0 million  customers and more than 200, $100,000 ARR customers.

Some of the key customers of the company include, Goldman Sachs, Pinnacol Assurance, Sopra Steria, UBS, U.S. Army Cyber, U.S. Airforce Kessel Run, Siemens, General Dynamics Missions Systems

Future opportunities seem huge and all inclusive. According to Gartner prediction that, 40% of organizations will be switching to DevOps delivery platforms by 2023, for streamlining application delivery. Gitlabs believes that this the beginning and in future all organisations will be turning to DevOps delivery platforms for shaping innovations and Gitlab is uniquely positioned to tap these opportunities.  In India Postman is building an API platform for building and using APIs by simplifying API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration. Started by Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti, and Abhijit Kane, is one of the world’s leading collaboration platform for API development. In a increasingly globalised World, Indian Investors can look for the global emerging opportunity as some of the great concepts are coming to exchange for listing. These concepts are also a reflection of future development in software space and some of these new generation’s companies will become the mega corporations of the future.  

On 15th Oct 2021, Stock touched a high of $115.46 and had a closing valuation of approx. $16.45 Billion

Bureau Galactik Views

Related articles