Y Combinator-backed GitHub competitor GitLab raises $1.5M

GitLab, the startup behind the eponymous open-source Git repository management software for storing and collaborating on source code, announced today that it has raised a $1.5 million seed round.

In many ways, GitLab is similar to GitHub — you can explore projects on the web and host your own projects online for free, for instance — but GitLab stands out, if for nothing else, by making its core Community Edition available under an open-source license. That means you can run it on your own server without paying for it.

News of the funding for GitLab comes a few weeks after VentureBeat reported that Google had quietly launched a new Git repository hosting service, Cloud Source Repositories.

The GitLab project was first conceived in Ukraine in 2011. GitLab has since won plenty of converts from GitHub, which last month was reported to be raising $200 million in venture funding. More than 100,000 organizations now use the GitLab software, including Alibaba, IBM, and SpaceX.

The company GitLab B.V. was established in the Netherlands last year and is opening an office in San Francisco. GitLab participated in the winter 2015 batch of prominent Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator.

Khosla Ventures, 500 Startups, CrunchFund, Sound Ventures, and Liquid 2 Ventures all participated in GitLab’s seed round.

A GitLab blog post has more detail on the news.