GitLab Mission

Mission

Unlock every team to ship trusted software at the speed of imagination.

The world we’re building for

Software will be built by machines, directed by people.

AI is becoming the substrate on which future software gets built. Agents plan, code, review, deploy, and repair. The work humans still own — and will keep owning — is the judgment that matters most: architecture, deep understanding of the customer problem, and the tradeoffs that require taste.

The demand for software multiplies in the agentic era.

Software has been the force multiplier behind nearly every business transformation of the modern era. The constraint was always the cost and time of producing it. That constraint is collapsing. When software can be built in minutes instead of weeks, every business builds more of it, not less. There will be more builders than ever, and we serve an increasing number of them.

The consequential work belongs to engineers. Engineering has always been about more than writing code. Great engineers are problem solvers and builders who care about system design, distributed systems, reasoning through failures, safely integrating new capability into critical systems, and making decisions under ambiguity. These are exactly the skills the agentic era needs more of, especially as the volume of software increases. The supply of deep technical problems is multiplying, and the engineers who can solve them will be among the scarcest and most valuable talent in the market. Their roles are changing, their importance isn’t.

This is the world we’re building GitLab for.

The drag we’re eliminating

For too long, shipping software has meant choosing between two bad options:

Move fast, and break things. Move safely, and ship nothing.

Either way, the result is drag — the friction between an idea and the moment it reaches a customer. Drag shows up as handoffs between tools, gates between teams, security as an afterthought, accumulating tech debt and experience debt, compliance as a tax, and weeks lost to coordination that should have taken minutes.

At machine rate, drag becomes catastrophic. When agents open thousands of merge requests, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits faster than any human team ever did, the friction that was tolerable in the human era becomes the bottleneck that defines the agentic one.

Our job is to free everyone from the drag, so every team can ship software with both speed and control.

What we believe

Five beliefs guide everything we build:

Quality is in the eye of the user. No matter how automated, fast or capable AI becomes, how humans perceive the quality of a tool, determines its success. Pixels without purpose are pointless, great experiences are created when we define success from the user’s perspective.

Trust is built in, not bolted on. Security, compliance, and governance are properties of the platform itself, not features added at the end. Strong platforms remove the drag that lives in the seams between tools and teams and are the only way speed and control stop being a trade-off.

Context is the moat. Models commoditize. What doesn’t is the connected understanding of how a team plans, codes, reviews, secures, deploys, and operates software, accumulated over years.

Humans direct, machines build, both are first-class. Every enterprise will live across a spectrum of human-owned, agent-assisted, and agent-autonomous work. Agents are participants on the platform and need to be accounted for by AI First design thinking, not by adapting human tool patterns.

Software gets built everywhere. Cloud and model choice belong to the customer. We’re the constant across them, enabling freedom and adaptability in an industry where the constant is change - in models, patterns, participants, processes and purpose. We are there for it

What we’re building

Platforms that weren’t built for machine scale are starting to break under it. Winning the agentic engineering era means making the right structural investments to ensure security, performance at scale, reliability, and quality of user experience. We’re making five architectural bets to be the Intelligent Orchestration platform for the agentic engineering era. Each one is built to deliver without disruption to the customers who depend on GitLab today.

Machine-scale infrastructure. Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did. Git itself wasn’t designed for that load, and bolting AI onto platforms not built for agents is the biggest mistake of this era. We’re doing a generational rebuild of the underlying infrastructure to handle agent-rate work as the default. Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services. And agent-specific APIs are being built so agents can act as first-class users of the platform, not as bolted-on consumers of human-shaped interfaces.

Orchestration across the full lifecycle. A single agent that writes code or opens a merge request produces activity. Enterprises don’t need agent activity. They need running software that moves the business forward. Orchestration is the layer that gets you there. It coordinates agents across the lifecycle, assigning work, managing state, passing context, resolving conflicts, enforcing policy, and keeping a human in the loop when it matters. CI/CD is one of the components getting reimagined here. The pipeline was designed to take human-rate commits and ship them safely; in the agentic era our orchestration service becomes the runtime that coordinates agents, validates the work and enforces guardrails, and drives change all the way to production at machine rate.

Context as the moat Enterprise AI bills are climbing as fast as adoption. What doesn’t commoditize is the context the model gets to work with: a data model that connects planning, code, review, security, deployment, and operations across every project and repository, accumulated over years of a team’s work. We’re investing in that connected data model as a first-class, API-accessible service, getting richer with every human and agent action. Context is what lets agents spend fewer tokens and deliver better results.

Governance in the core. Governance is what lets enterprises move fast in the agentic era. Like a race car, it doesn’t matter how fast you can go if you can’t maintain control. As agents take on more of the work, enterprises need a platform that can enforce who’s allowed to do what, prove what happened and why, and keep sensitive code and data where it belongs. We’re building identity, audit, policy, and deployment flexibility as core platform services that every agent, pipeline, and merge request runs through by default, rather than a separate product layered on top.

One platform, three modes. Trillions of lines of code run the world’s businesses today. Rewriting most of it is too risky and too expensive to justify. The cloud era taught us enterprises run hybrid, and operating across that mix has been painful, expensive, and never fully solved. The agentic era will be the same. Every enterprise will live across a spectrum of human-owned, agent-assisted, and agent-autonomous work. We’re building one platform, one data model, one governance system that operates across all three modes, and delivering it cloud and model neutral.

The way we work

A culture of excellence is how we make the strategy real. Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, and Customer Outcomes are our operating principles. Move quickly. Own outcomes. Deliver real value to customers.

A flexible business model The way software gets built is changing, and our business model is evolving with it. We’re keeping what works: the predictability of subscriptions for what customers have today. We’ve already added consumption pricing for the work agents do, with other major players following over the past few months. Next, we’re introducing more flexibility to mix both as the way of work evolves.

From Act 1 to Act 2

Our original mission was “everyone can contribute.” It was a claim about access — the people closest to the work should be able to shape the software they depend on.

Act 2 carries that DNA forward. “Everyone” is still at the heart of what we do. What changes is the scope: from contributing code to shipping entire systems, autonomously, securely, at the speed of imagination.

Everyone could contribute. Now everyone can ship.

GitLab’s mission Unlock every team to ship trusted software at the speed of imagination.

Customer acceptance

We firmly adhere to laws including trade compliance laws – see the GitLab Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, in countries where we do business, and welcome everyone abiding by those legal restrictions to be customers of GitLab. In some circumstances, we may opt to not work with particular organizations, on a case-by-case basis. Some reasons we may choose not to work with certain entities include, but are not limited to:

1. Engaging in illegal, unlawful behavior.
2. Making derogatory statements or threats toward anyone in our community.
3. Encouraging violence or discrimination against legally protected groups.

This policy is in alignment with our mission, contributor and employee code-of-conduct and company values.

Mitigating Concerns

We acknowledge the concerns to achieving our goals. We document them in our Mitigating Concerns page.

 

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