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GitLab Inc.

DevOps and Software Development Lifecycle PlatformsFounded 2011
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Company data updated: October 2026

Founders

Who Founded GitLab?

Dmitriy Zaporozhets, Valery Sizov, Sid Sijbrandij · Founded 2011 · HQ today: San Francisco, California

Who founded GitLab?

GitLab was founded by Dmitriy Zaporozhets, Valery Sizov, Sid Sijbrandij in 2011. It is now led by Bill Staples.

Founders
Dmitriy Zaporozhets, Valery Sizov, Sid Sijbrandij
Founded
2011
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Number of founders
3
Current CEO
Bill Staples (since 2024)
Where was GitLab founded?
GitLab was founded in San Francisco, California in 2011.
When was GitLab founded?
GitLab was founded in 2011.
Who started GitLab?
GitLab was founded by Dmitriy Zaporozhets, Valery Sizov and Sid Sijbrandij.
How old is GitLab?
GitLab is 15 years old as of 2026.

Founding Story

In 2011 Dmitriy Zaporozhets, a developer in Kharkiv, Ukraine, needed a better way to collaborate on code and wrote GitLab in Ruby on Rails with Valery Sizov, releasing it as open source. In 2012 Sid Sijbrandij, a Dutch entrepreneur, saw the project on Hacker News, started GitLab.com as a hosted service, and later persuaded Zaporozhets to work on it full time. The pair built the company remotely, joined Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch, and grew it into a public company in 2021.

Dmitriy Zaporozhets

Co-founder 2011

Background

Software developer in Kharkiv, Ukraine, who wrote the first version of GitLab in Ruby on Rails in 2011 and later served as GitLab's CTO and engineering fellow.

Role at GitLab Inc.

Dmitriy Zaporozhets created GitLab in 2011 with Valery Sizov because he wanted a self-hosted, open-source tool for collaborating on Git repositories. After Sid Sijbrandij began commercializing the project in 2012, Zaporozhets joined the company full time, led engineering as CTO and later became an engineering fellow before stepping back from day-to-day work around the time of the 2021 IPO. Dmitriy Zaporozhets was born in 1987.

Valery Sizov

Co-founder 2011

Background

Software developer from Ukraine who actively contributed to the open-source GitLab project.

Role at GitLab Inc.

Valery Sizov was an early contributor to the open-source GitLab project originally created by Dmitriy Zaporozhets. He was formally recognized as a co-founder due to his massive early technical contributions to the core architecture before leaving the project. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Sid Sijbrandij

Co-founder 2014

Background

Dutch entrepreneur who previously worked on recreational submarines at U-Boat Worx and on Ruby on Rails projects before co-founding GitLab's business.

Role at GitLab Inc.

Sid Sijbrandij found GitLab on Hacker News in 2012, launched GitLab.com and built the company around an open-core model, an all-remote workforce and a public handbook. He was CEO from the company's early days through its October 2021 Nasdaq IPO, stepped down as CEO in December 2024 to focus on cancer treatment, and remains executive chair of the board. Sid Sijbrandij was born in 1979.

GitLab Inc.: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Jessica Ross

Chief Financial Officer

2025 – Present

As CFO, she heavily optimized the company's pricing tiers, driving massive revenue expansion from enterprise clients adopting GitLab's premium security and compliance features.

Bill Staples

Chief Executive Officer

2024 – Present

Former CEO of New Relic and longtime Microsoft and Adobe executive, brought in to scale GitLab past $1 billion in revenue.

Sid Sijbrandij

Co-founder, Executive Chair (CEO until December 2024)

2012 – Present

As CEO, he aggressively positioned GitLab as a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, directly challenging the fragmented toolchains offered by Microsoft and Atlassian.

Keep researching GitLab

Who Founded GitLab? FAQ

Who founded GitLab and in what year was the platform created?

GitLab was originally created in October 2011 by Ukrainian software engineer Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov. In 2012, Dutch entrepreneur Sid Sijbrandij teamed up with Dmitriy to formally establish GitLab Inc. as a commercial business enterprise.

What motivated Dmitriy Zaporozhets to create GitLab in 2011?

Dmitriy Zaporozhets was working as a software developer in Ukraine and wanted a powerful, centralized Git code collaboration tool for his engineering team, but existing commercial solutions were prohibitively expensive. He built GitLab as a free, open-source Ruby on Rails application from his house in Ukraine.

How did Sid Sijbrandij discover GitLab and partner with Dmitriy Zaporozhets?

In 2012, Sid Sijbrandij saw GitLab's rapid traction on Hacker News and realized the large commercial potential of an open-source GitHub alternative. He contacted Dmitriy Zaporozhets, agreeing to fund Dmitriy's full-time work on GitLab, leading to the incorporation of GitLab B.V. in the Netherlands.

What role did Y Combinator play in the early growth of GitLab in 2015?

GitLab was accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator W15 batch in Silicon Valley. During the 3-month program, the founding team refined GitLab's open-core commercial subscription model, landed major enterprise trial customers, and raised initial seed capital from prominent angel investors.

What foundational values did the founders establish in GitLab's CREDIT culture?

The founders instituted GitLab's core values encapsulated in the acronym CREDIT: Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency, which continue to guide all company policies and employee reviews.

What was Dmitriy Zaporozhets' role at GitLab until his retirement in 2021?

Dmitriy Zaporozhets served as GitLab's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Engineering Fellow, leading core architecture design, writing thousands of commits, and ensuring the platform maintained high code quality before retiring as an executive in 2021 prior to GitLab's IPO.

Why did the founders decide against opening physical corporate offices?

The founders realized that hiring top engineering talent globally was a major competitive advantage. Rather than forcing employees to relocate to expensive tech hubs like San Francisco, they embraced an all-remote model that democratized opportunity and minimized overhead costs.

How did early open-source contributors help build GitLab into a comprehensive platform?

Early open-source contributors submitted critical features including merge requests, continuous integration runners, LDAP authentication, and issue trackers, rapidly closing feature gaps with proprietary software and establishing GitLab as a community-driven project.

Who founded GitLab?

It was founded by Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Sid Sijbrandij. Dmitriy was the absolute technical founder, writing the original open-source Ruby code. He famously stayed heavily out of the corporate spotlight and officially retired from the company in 2021 right after the massive IPO made him incredibly wealthy.

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Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.