An earlier picture of Mitchell and Armon with me at our Menlo Park office
Today HashiCorp announced a $100M Series D financing at a $1.9B valuation, led by IVP, with participation from all inside investors including GGV, Mayfield, Redpoint and True and also from new investor Bessemer. At GGV, we’re strong believers in HashiCorp and are excited to increase our ownership stake in this round, investing substantially more than our pro rata. Why are we so optimistic, even as the company’s valuation has continued to increase rapidly? Our enthusiasm results from HashiCorp’s very strong leadership team, the deep loyalty the company has engendered with its open source community, and the commercial momentum HashiCorp has built by helping enterprises adopt a multi-cloud strategy.
- Leadership Team. Hashicorp founders Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar bring tremendous vision and product sensibility to the company, and they’re very ably complemented by CEO Dave McJannet, who has done a masterful job positioning the company and building a strong team of functional leaders. Despite the hyperbolic expansion to date, the team is doing a great job putting the company on a path where it continues to execute at a very high level across disciplines, and this group is well positioned to steward the company as it scales further.
- Thriving Open Source Community. HashiCorp was born as an open source company and this is core to how the company operates. Mitchell and Armon devote a tremendous amount of time to understanding the needs of open source users, and the company’s engineering resources are similarly invested in the success of its open source versions. This commitment has engendered loyalty in a major way. HashiCorp had 45 million downloads of its open source products in the past 12 months, up from 22 million the previous year. Similarly, HashiConf, the company’s annual user and technology conference that took place last week in SF, had 1,200 attendees, up from 300 attendees three years ago at the first HashiConf. The company churns out a dizzying number of commits and updates of its open source products, and gets meaningful contribution from its user base as well.
- Commercial Momentum of the Company’s Multi-Cloud Strategy. The company’s products help enterprises transition to the cloud, enabling users to effectively and cohesively manage workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. As I’ve written about previously, the move to cloud and multi-cloud is the biggest computing paradigm shift in history, and HashiCorp’s products provide an essential cloud-neutral control layer for this shift. Uptake has been incredible. In less than three years of shipping product, HashiCorp has grown to serve over 50 of the Fortune 500 and over 100 of the Global 2000 as paying customers. The overwhelming majority of these customers began as HashiCorp open source users, validating the company’s dual open source and commercial strategy.
The last four years for HashiCorp, since GGV invested in late ’14, have been remarkable growth years, but given the company’s leadership team, open source community loyalty, and multi-cloud commercial momentum, the best is most certainly yet to come!