Forbes ranking of America’s Best Startup Employers 2020 includes two Ukrainian companies
Forbes published America’s Best Startups Employers 2020, as part of its annual research on the best U.S. employers. The top 500 were selected from more than 2,500 applicants on three criteria: employer reputation, employee satisfaction, and growth.
The ranking includes two companies founded by the Ukrainians: GitLab is No. 35 on this list, and Allset – No. 263.
About the companies
GitLab
GitLab is a collaboration and DevOps platform. The startup’s main competitor is GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft since 2018.
The startup was founded by Kharkiv citizen Dmitriy Zaporozhets in 2011. In 2013, the second founder, the Dutch entrepreneur Sid Sijbrandij, joined the startup. From that moment on, they started working on GitLab fulltime.
The company has about 100,000 corporate clients, including Ask Media Group, Charter Communication, Delta Air Lines, Goldman Sachs, Ticketmaster, Nvidia, etc. The company employs over 800 people from 55 countries.
In September 2019, GitLab raised a $268 million Series E round. The company was evaluated at $2.7 billion. Among the investors were Goldman Sachs, Iconiq Capital, Y Combinator, and Continuity Fund. Together with the new round, GitLab raised a total of $426 million.
Previously, in an interview with AIN.UA, Dmitriy Zaporozhets commented on the geographical identity of the company as follows:
“One founder is from Ukraine, so it is partly a Ukrainian startup. Another founder is from the Netherlands – so it is partly a Dutch startup. Later, investors from California came, so, now, it is partly an American startup as well. On this basis, I believe that GitLab can be called a Ukrainian startup.”
Allset
Allset is a service for booking of tables in restaurants, which also allows you to pre-order a meal and pay via a mobile application.
Allset was founded by Ukrainians Stas Matvienko and Anna Polischuk in 2015. Before the rebranding in 2016, the application was called Settle.
The company has two offices: in San Francisco and Kyiv. The development team is in Ukraine, and application tests take place in the U.S. The company has about 50 employees.
The company has raised a total of $8.35 million in investments, including from Andreessen Horowitz, Vaizra Investments, Compound, FJ Labs, and the Ukrainian SMRK VC Fund, founded by Oleksandr Kosovan, also known for CleanMyMac.