Multibillion-dollar valuations of remote companies - Zapier & GitLab 🚀‍

Sequoia, a leading venture capital firm, is known for keeping an eye out for emerging startups. It has a hand in some of the biggest businesses today like LinkedIn, Yahoo, WhatsApp, Oracle, PayPal & Stripe.

Yet, Sequoia was unable to own a piece of Zapier, the popular automation tool loved by thousands. The problem? Zapier didn’t need their money. In 2012, Zapier had raised just $1.3 million in seed funding and has been running profitably since.

Sequoia instead found a way into Zapier by buying shares from Zapier's founders in the secondary market, at above $4 billion valuations.

GitLab, an all-remote company best known for its culture, provided its employees with an opportunity to benefit from the value they have created together.

It allowed current and former employees with vested equity to sell a combined total of 4.9 million shares, bringing the total offering to $195 million.

GitLab has experienced great growth and has now reached $150 million in annual recurring revenue after growing by 74 % in the most recent quarter.

The recent employee share sale values GitLab at $6 billion up from a $2.7 billion valuation in 2019.