GitLab raised a substantial $268 million in a Series E funding round that was more than doubled what the firm had raised across all of its previous funding rounds and pushed its valuation to $2.75 billion. It also bolsters the company’s coffers as it battles in an increasingly competitive DevOps space.

GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij said in an email to SDxCentral that the new Series E funds will help the company continue to move on its goal of providing a single application to support quicker delivery of software. It claims more than 100,000 organizations use its platform.

“These funds will help us to keep up with that pace and add to that with our company engineers,” Sijbrandij explained. “We need to make sure every part of GitLab is great and that CIOs and CTOs who supply the tools for their teams know that if they bet on GitLab that we’ll stand up to their expectations.”

Sijbrandij said the company will also use the new funds to add monitoring and security features for customers in a single application experience. He said that the company receives more than 200 improvements from the wider community every month. It also releases a new update into the market each month.

GitLab will also use the Series E funds to add more employees to target products, marketing, and sales. Sijbrandij noted that the company has doubled its employee base over the past year, counting more than 800 “team members” spread across 55 countries, yet is still sitting on 222 open job positions.

The size of the latest funding round was also notable due to its past two rounds. A year ago, the company raised $100 million in an investment series that pushed its valuation to more than $1 billion. However, it followed that up less than four months later with a $20 million funding round.

Sijbrandij said that those most recent rounds allowed GitLab to move forward on a number of new platform releases. These included a focus on easing security integration into the development pipeline and speeding the release of more secure releases. It also launched a bug bounty program.

He said the company remained on track to hit its previously announced plan of going public on Nov. 18, 2020. So mark your calendars.

GitLab’s Series E round and new valuation moves it closer to the $7.5 billion Microsoft spent last year to acquire rival “Git” GitHub. That deal drew concern from many in the open source space averse to Microsoft buying control of one of the ecosystem’s largest code repositories.

Shortly after that deal was announced, GitLab migrated its operations from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The move included transitioning all data and files into various GCP products and for greater use of Kubernetes. GitLab tried to downplay a connection to the Microsoft deal and instead linked it to GitLab’s move to support automated container cluster deployments using Kubernetes through the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

“Our GCP migration is unrelated to the acquisition news,” William Chia, senior product marketing manager at GitLab, wrote in an email to SDxCentral at that time. “We’ve been planning it for a while and announced the migration … when we launched our native GKE integration.”

The Git rivalry heated up again last month after GitHub integrated a much sought-after continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) tool into its Actions product that expands its ability to serve broader needs of the developer community.

Thomas Murphy, senior director analyst at Gartner, told SDxCentral that the Github move was a strong push by the company to show that it can still operate independently from Microsoft.

“Microsoft has changed quite a bit, and for GitHub it’s important to show they are continuing to support that open source community,” Murphy said.

As for the broader market, Murphy said the GitHub move aligns with the evolution of the developer space. “All of the vendors are evolving their products and doing similar types of things,” he said, noting similar offerings from vendors like Atlassian, GitLab, and CloudBees.

GitLab’s Sijbrandij is not concerned by the competition.

“We see the industry as finally catching wind of our vision and trying to embrace the single application,” he said. “The industry is trying to follow our lead, but we are leading the pack and believe we can continue to innovate at a pace that will keep us years ahead of others.”