GitLab’s Chinese fork closed A series to promote DevOps open-source platform in China

Jihu, or GitLab.cn, announced on April 11 the completion of its Series A financing round, which raised “hundreds of millions yuan”. This round of financing was conducted in two phases, with the first phase led by Temasek and followed by Alpha Prime, GGV Capital, Shanghai AI Industry Fund, and Nokia Growth Fund, and the second phase led by Taikang Life and followed by Bilibili-associated Ganbei Fund and Lenovo Venture Capital. 

The proceeds will be used for R&D team expansion, market development, open-source ecosystem construction, and intellectual property development, according to Jihu. 

Founded in March 2021, Jihu has a vision of being “the founder of China’s open-source culture”. Jihu provides a tailor-made Chinese distribution of GitLab’s DevOps platform, which would be available as both a self-managed and SaaS offering (GitLab.cn).

GitLab Inc. is a Y Combinator company founded in 2011, focusing on software development tools. The company has over 100,000 enterprise customers and over 3,000 contributors. Despite licensing its technology and brand to Jihu  to serve customers in China, GitLab Inc.’s SaaS service (GitLab.com) and Jihu’s SaaS service (GitLab.cn) share no common infrastructure, networking connectivity, systems, services, data, or resources. 

Jihu’s CEO Chen Ran emphasizes that the new round of financing lowers GitLab Inc.’s shareholding ratio to under 50%, making fully Jihu a localized, independent company, dominated by Chinese board members.