Sid Sijbrandij
Co-founder of GitLab
The GitLab co-founder shipped AI into the DevOps platform he built, then backed a new venture — the open-source coding agent Kilo Code — betting on AI tools that developers “could actually inspect, trust, and extend.”
In his words
Developers were craving tools they could actually inspect, trust, and extend. That’s what pushed me to build Kilo Code as an open source, all-in-one coding agent.
Biography
Sytse “Sid” Sijbrandij (born around 1979) is the Dutch-born co-founder of GitLab, the all-in-one DevOps platform he helped turn from an open-source project into a publicly traded company. He led GitLab as CEO for over a decade before stepping back to executive chair amid a cancer diagnosis.
From GitLab Duo to Kilo
Under Sijbrandij, GitLab built AI directly into its platform through GitLab Duo, adding code suggestions, chat, and automation across the software lifecycle. In 2025 he moved into the AI coding wave more directly, co-founding and funding Kilo Code — an open-source, model-agnostic coding agent — which raised an $8 million seed round and climbed the usage charts.
His guiding conviction is openness. Rather than a closed, single-vendor assistant, Sijbrandij wants coding agents that developers can read, audit, and adapt — a continuation of the open-source ethos that built GitLab, now applied to the age of autonomous coding.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/sid-sijbrandij