This fully-remote startup, with over 1000 employees in more than 65 countries, is now worth more than $6 billion

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people around the world have died from the deadly virus. 2020 has turned out to be a tragic year for all of us. With all the bad news about the virus, it’s hard to find any silver linings. However, 2020 has also been a transformational year for individuals and businesses alike. It is no longer “business as usual.” Most businesses are now adapting to fit into the new digital economy.

One key area is remote working. Before COVID-19, thousands, if not millions of companies, allowed their employees to work from home a couple of days a week. The pandemic has now accelerated to work remotely, as one of the measures to stop the spread of the virus.

One company that really stands out is GitLab, a rival to Microsoft’s GitHub and provider of the popular open-source code collaboration platform that enables developers to create, review, and deploy codebases. We covered the 8-year old startup back in 2019 when it raised $268 million at $2.75 billion.

Since its inception in 2012, GitLab has been fully remote, without any physical offices. Instead, its 1,300-plus employees in more than 65 countries have long been connecting and working from home via Zoom, Slack, and other teleconferencing tools.

GitLab had hoped to go public this month. But the coronavirus pandemic forced it to shift the timing of its IPO. The company is now expected to debut next year instead. Now, GitLab is letting some employees sell a portion of their equity in a secondary share offering. The deal more than doubles the eight-year-old start-up’s valuation to $6 billion.

GitHub is a rival to GitLab. Microsoft acquired GitHub on June 4, 2018, for US$7.5 billion. As of January of this year, GitHub reportedly has over 40 million users and more than 190 million repositories (including at least 28 million public repositories), making it the largest host of source code in the world. GitLab has 100,000 users (as of March 2017) and is used by enterprises such as IBM, Sony, and NASA.

Founded in 2014 by Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Sytse Sijbrandij, GitLab is a DevOps platform built from the ground up as a single application for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle enabling Product, Design, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams to work concurrently on the same project. GitLab provides teams a single data store, one user interface, and one permission model across the DevOps lifecycle, allowing teams to collaborate and work on a project from a single conversation, significantly reducing cycle time and focus exclusively on building great software quickly.

Built on open-source, GitLab leverages the community contributions of thousands of developers and millions of users to continuously deliver new DevOps innovations. GitLab is used by more than 100,000 organizations around the globe from startups to global enterprises, including Ticketmaster, Jaguar Land Rover, NASDAQ, Dish Network, and Comcast.