Ashton Kutcher invested in a Ukrainian startup

The GitLab project began in 2011. Kharkov citizen Dmitry Zaporozhets I was looking for an analogue of the GitHub service with affordable prices: the cost of using the American project reached five thousand dollars a year. “There was no good free or low-cost solution,” recalls Zaporozhets. So the idea was to create GitLab, a more affordable version of GitHub, but with the same set of features and capabilities.

Imagine that you have five stores throughout the city, and records are kept in paper books. It takes a huge amount of time to check all the books and mix them into one understandable system and requires an individual, or even two. In addition, if the numbers need to be checked, you need to take up the paper archives and search for everything manually. Modern online systems allow this process to be as simple as possible and reduced to a few clicks. GitLab works in much the same way, but for developers who write tens of thousands of lines of code every day.

In simple terms, GitLab is an online service for storing project source code, based on the Git file management system. Services like GitLab are needed by developers to track changes in the code of projects, that is, every time a part of the code changes, a new version is saved. This is especially important in large companies where a large number of users work on projects: this makes it easier to track version changes.

Launched in 2011 by Zaporozhets, GitLab quickly began to gain popularity for several reasons. First, the service was sharpened for teamwork, while GitHub is more convenient for individual work. Secondly, the GitLab team immediately after the release began to actively update the project: once in two weeks, small updates were released, once every two or three months - major updates, after which new functions and features were added.

The key factor for the active transition to GitLab was the price. If an annual subscription for ten users in GitHub costs $2500, then in GitLab the same number of users can work for $390 - an affordable price for small organizations. For larger ones, GitLab offers a hundred-person option for $14 per year. In GitHub - $900, respectively. Today, GitLab services are used by more than a hundred thousand organizations, including NASA, SpaceX, CERN and IBM.

The project was not created by Zaporozhets alone. Being a techie and engineer, he is interested in solving technical problems. Project management and management tasks took over Sist Sijbrandi, which until this day holds the post of CEO of GitLab. According to Zaporozhtsy, Sid’s persistence (as Sijbrandi calls himself) helped the service get into Y Combinator - the most famous start-up accelerator in the world.

In a conversation with a Forbes correspondent, Sid noted that going through a three-month acceleration program at Y Combinator taught us a lot: “Participation helped us focus and accelerate growth.” For $ 120 000, GitLab gave the startup accelerator 7%, and in return received three months of training programs.

Upon completion of the acceleration program, curators of Y Combinator introduced GitLab to a number of investors. Among them was the Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, which, in addition to its direct activity, is actively engaged in investments in start-ups. His main achievement is participation in the seed-round of investments for Airbnb, which today is estimated at $ 25 billion.

According to Sid, before investing, he had a long conversation with Kutcher: the actor wanted to know literally every detail. “He is really a very smart person, he helps many startups,” stresses GitLab's CEO. In addition to Kutcher, 1,5 Startups, Khosla Ventures, Liquid 500 Ventures and Crunchfund also participated in the $ 2 million round. “We’ve invested in GitLab, because the service allows developers to easily test each other’s work and collaborate to create great products,” explains Vinod Koshla, founder of Khosla Ventures.

All funds received will be spent on the development of GitLab. In the near future, an office in San Francisco will open, which will be taken over by sales managers. This will significantly increase the sales of the paid enterprise version of the product. “Money was raised for aggressive growth. In addition, in addition to salespeople, a couple of engineers are also needed, ”says Zaporozhets.

Now GitLab does not have a single office. Part of the team is in the Netherlands, the CEO in the USA, another developer is in Ukraine, where Zaporozhets spends most of the time. On the question of how to become a competitor to the huge GitHub, Dmitry responds modestly: a lot of work. And, of course, a bit of luck.