14 DAY TRIAL // GitLab, the Ukrainian team that's been giving GitHub a run for its money, has announced that it raised $1.5 million / €1.35 million in seed funding.
GitLab, as a product, is a Git-hosting system for code repositories, similar to what GitHub is offering but with a twist.
Besides the free online Git-hosting accounts it provides, the company behind GitLab also offers a version of its software, which developers can download and install on their own servers.
There is the Community Edition, which is offered for free but with limited support, and the Enterprise Edition for larger enterprises, which also comes with extended and quicker support.
Slowly nibbling away at GitHub's enterprise market by nabbing companies like Alibaba, IBM, SpaceX, NASA, CERN, and Qualcomm, GitLab is now a serious competitor to take into account, right there next to Microsoft Azure, Amazon, and Google (through its recently released Cloud Source Repositories offering).
Ashton Kutcher and Joe Montana are among investors
The company behind the GitLab product, GitLab B.V. after having incorporated in Holland and having participated in Y Combinator's Startup Accelerator program in the winter of 2015, has now raised a small portion of the financial base it will need for its future battle with GitHub.
"It is our goal to become the default solution for anyone building software and working together," says the official announcement, which then continues, "The excitement and passion of our community has convinced us that open-source is the way forward."
The raised funds are small compared to what other startups usually take for seed fund, and incredibly tiny compared to GitHub's recent Series B funding round of $200 / €177 million.
Khosla Ventures, 500 Startups, Crunchfund, Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher), and Liquid 2 Ventures (Joe Montana) have participated in this initial funding round.
