GitLab Inc. GTLB

The business

GitLab is where software gets built. Engineers store the code there, the platform runs the tests, scans for vulnerabilities and pushes the result into production. The pitch is that all of it lives in one product rather than six stitched together, which matters most to the security and compliance people rather than to the engineers themselves.

It sells per seat, per year, to engineering organisations that range from a two-person startup to a bank. Because the platform is where the source code lives, migrating off it is the kind of project a head of engineering postpones indefinitely. That is the moat, and the constraint is that a per-seat product grows with the number of engineers a customer employs.