By Vibhuti Sharma and Supantha Mukherjee
(Reuters) - U.S. coding platform GitLab raised $100 million in its latest round of funding, catapulting the company into the unicorn club with a valuation of more than $1 billion.
The funding round was led by Iconiq Capital, the Silicon Valley fund that is an investment vehicle for the founders of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) and Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), GitLab said on Wednesday.
"This should probably be the last one before the company's IPO on November 18, 2020," GitLab co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Sytse Sijbrandij said about the funding, which is five times more than what the company raised in its previous round last October.
Founded by Sijbrandij and another Ukrainian developer Dmitriy Zaporozhets in 2011, GitLab counts Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Inc's Google Ventures, Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures among its investors.
The company competes with rival GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) in a $7.5 billion deal earlier this year.
The deal came as a blessing to GitLab as thousands of developers jumped ship on worries that GitHub may end up favoring Microsoft products over others.