$Gitlab(GTLB.US)$ shares jumped 35% in their first day of trading on Thursday after it sold shares well above its expected range in its IPO.
$Gitlab(GTLB.US)$ is a cloud-based depository of software. The platform allows developers to share and contribute to each other’s work.
Since its founding almost a decade ago, GitLab has been chasing down GitHub in the source repository market, which also includes Atlassian’s Bitbucket. $Microsoft(MSFT.US)$ acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, and since that time GitLab has grown rapidly as the only big independent player in the market.
Revenue in the second quarter jumped 69% from a year earlier to $58.1 million. However, because GitLab spends the equivalent of three-quarters of its revenue on sales and marketing, largely to build its developer user base, the company recorded a net loss of $40.2 million in the latest quarter.
GitLab raised close to $650 million in the offering, and investors purchased over $150 million of additional stock from an entity affiliated with GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij.
Despite having an outstanding beginning, Gitlab is still facing severe competition. Github, Red Hat, Bitbucket, Atlassian, etc. are all its strong competitors. Github poses the greatest threat, it is currently the world's largest code hosting platform, used by more than 50 million developers. The top three customers are $Microsoft(MSFT.US)$ , $Facebook(FB.US)$ , and $Alphabet-C(GOOG.US)$ .
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GitLab jumps 35% in its Nasdaq debut after code-sharing company priced IPO above expected range