An underground Silicon Valley sensation just got $20 million from Google's venture arm to take over the world

gitlab founders

GitLab, a fast-growing startup providing tools for software developers to work together, has raised $20 million in new venture capital funding in a round led by GV, the firm formerly known as Google Ventures.

The news that GitLab was close to announcing a new round of funding was first reported by Business Insider on Friday.

You may never have heard of GitLab: It's one of the chief rivals to both $2 billion Silicon Valley darling GitHub, as well as $8.8 billion Atlassian's popular BitBucket product, especially among big businesses. But GitLab has only recently started to gain renown in the developer space, as word spreads around.

Like its rivals, GitLab is based on "git," a popular and core developer technology, hence the name. Functionally, what GitLab does is give developers a way to work on the same software at the same time, providing an easy way to manage and merge all the different changes coming in.

And while GitHub made its name by making code available via the web, GitLab specializes in letting you install it on your own servers. Today, GitLab boasts that it controls two-thirds of the market for "self-hosted git," speaking to its popularity.

It's been an eventful year for GitLab, too: Back in February, employee error led to an overnight outage. However, the company ultimately won praise for the transparency with which it addressed the outage, keeping users appraised via a stream of detailed updates.

gitlab team

Notably, GitLab's new funding isn't going to go towards material things like new offices or international expansion — largely because every single one of GitLab's 193 employees works remotely. GitLab CEO Sytse "Sid" Sijbrandij lives in San Francisco, but the rest of the company is scattered all over the world.

Instead, the company is racing to bolster its product lineup, complementing its core development tools with new products to help manage and maintain applications once they're running. The idea is to support what the company calls a "DevOps lifecycle," or the flow of keeping developers in the loop of the actual operation of their app.

Plus, GitLab is staffing up with new executives: Last week, GitLab named a new chief culture officer, chief marketing officer, and VP of engineering. In conjunction with today's funding news, GitLab adds WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg to its board of directors, too.

"With this funding, the support of our new board members and the day to day talent of our expanded leadership team, GitLab will become the first solution that supports the complete DevOps lifecycle," GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij tells Business Insider.

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