GitLab Up for Acquisition by Datadog, Sources Claim

Developer operations (DevOps) firm GitLab may be going private, with rumors circulating of an acquisition of the $8 billion company — with Datadog named as a potential buyer.

GitLab was founded by Dmytriy Zaporozhets and current chief executive officer Sytse "Sid" Sijbrandij in 2014, turning Zaporozhets' hobby code-sharing platform into an open-core freemium business. The launch was supported by $1.5 million in seed funding, and it has raised millions more in the years since — closing a $268 million Series E round in 2019, two years before it went public in an initial public offering on the NASDAQ exchange.

Now, though, the company could be going private once more, according to unnamed sources cited by newswire service Reuters. These sources named Datadog, specializing in collaborative working and cloud monitoring services, as among those interested in acquiring the company, currently valued at around $8 billion. Neither GitLab nor Datadog, however, have confirmed nor denied the rumor.

The potential acquisition comes six years after Microsoft acquired GitLab competitor GitHub, which launched in 2008 as a collaborative platform built on the Git version control system, in a deal valuing the company at $7.5 billion — $9.38 billion, correcting for inflation.

Any acquisition would, as always, be subject to regulatory approval — but the rumor has already helped fight an ongoing decline in GitLab's share price, which jumped by around 10 percent in early trading.