Which VCs are set to make a killing in GitLab’s IPO

Sep 20, 2021

Picking up where we left off Friday, let’s spend some more time in the GitLab IPO filing.

It’s going to be an IPO week, mind; Toast and Freshworks are set to price Tuesday after the close of trading and begin to float on Wednesday. Expect final notes on the value of each and reports on how they trade when they do. The Exchange will also try to get on calls with the CEOs. But because it is Disrupt week, things are going to be a little chaotic.

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But that’s tomorrow. This morning, we’re digging back into developer toolkit GitLab and its impending IPO. Let’s start with a dive into the venture capital players that are going to make out in its public offering. And for the sake of having fun on a Monday, we’ll look back at the GitHub-Microsoft deal. The former CTO of GitHub dropped some interesting data on the company’s historical results that we can use to back into what the deal would be worth today if it happened.

From there, we have some extrapolation to do. And we’ll close with an examination of GitLab’s quarterly data to see if a more narrow view of the company’s operating results tells us anything useful. Let’s have some fun!

GitLab’s rich list

As a private company, GitLab raised huge sums of capital — more than $400 million, per Crunchbase data. The capital came in increasingly large chunks from the company’s seed rounds back in 2015 through its late 2019 Series E.

Khosla Ventures led the company’s early rounds before GV, Goldman Sachs and ICONIQ Capital took the baton.

Unsurprisingly, those names are the ones we can spy on in the company’s major shareholder list. From the GitLab S-1 filing, what follows are share counts and percentage ownership stakes for the company’s investors that own more than 5% of its stock:

  • August Capital: 14,931,200 Class B shares, or 11.1% of that equity class
  • GV: 8,888,776 Class B shares, or 6.6% of that equity class
  • ICONIQ: 15,472,204 Class B shares, or 11.6% of that equity class
  • ICONIQ: 1,150,784 Class A shares, or 100% of that equity class (to be diluted in IPO)
  • Khosla: 19,028,320 Class B shares, or 14.1% of that equity class

Given that GitLab was valued at $6 billion earlier this year in a secondary transaction, the percentages above convert to huge sums. August Capital, for example, at that price point, is set to reap north of $600 million. That’s bigger than the entire fund from which it snagged ownership, the firm’s $450 million Fund VII.

,The GitLab debut is set to make a lot of funds material coin.

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