HashiCorp: Provisioning the Future of the Cloud

Today, IVP is thrilled to announce our investment in HashiCorp, the creators of the world’s most popular tools for multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud infrastructure, leading their $100M Series D. The internet is powered by HashiCorp. If you’ve ever streamed on Pandora, pinned on Pinterest, or simply swiped a credit card, you’ve probably relied on HashiCorp’s software to deliver a reliable, secure and performant experience. If you believe the future of infrastructure will be heterogeneous and programmable, you either are or should be a HashiCorp customer!

Why we invested:

Incredible Tailwinds

It takes an incredible number of factors to align for a startup to break out, but perhaps none more important than having the right product for the market at the right time. HashiCorp has made a science of it by listening to their customers and solving their emerging needs. We conducted numerous customer reference calls and heard the same refrain: co-founders and CTOs Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, and CEO Dave McJannet, spend time with their customers and incorporate their feedback. This customer-centric product iteration has positioned HashiCorp at the nexus of two of the most important trends in infrastructure as cloud adoption increases: heterogeneity & programmability. Enterprise infrastructure is only becoming more heterogeneous as companies complement data centers with a single public cloud offering (hybrid-cloud) and then another (multi-cloud), as well as adopting both containerized and virtualized services. The infrastructure is also becoming increasingly abstract, further removed from the nuts and bolts of the hardware. HashiCorp provides means of consistently programming that infrastructure automatically and elegantly, be it in your data center or a public cloud.

Massive Customer Adoption

While enterprise infrastructure is often viewed as arcane and niche, especially by the popular press, HashiCorp’s product downloads, 45 million in the last twelve months alone, would make all but the most viral consumer apps envious. Why are they so widely adopted and trusted? It starts with open source. By publishing free, open source versions of all their tools, practitioners at startups and the world’s largest companies alike are able to try HashiCorp’s products before deciding whether the open source or the commercial enterprise offerings are what they need. They can adopt them individually or in concert. That’s complemented by their users loving them once they get started. In fact, many of them ultimately contribute back to the HashiCorp community. HashiCorp has one of the largest open source developer communities. For instance, HashiCorp Terraform alone has about as many contributors listed on GitHub as Apache Spark or Git. HashiCorp is also unique in establishing product-market fit across not one, but four products (Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad) that solve four distinct needs (workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure for any application).

Visionary Founders and CEO

Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, co-founders and CTOs, exemplify the type of visionary, technical founders Silicon Valley is built upon. They are as comfortable with coding as with customers, as starting an open source journey of unknown destination as they are helping lead a company whose headcount is now in the hundreds. We had the privilege of first getting to know this founding team nearly three years ago. When they made the decision to partner with Dave McJannet, an executive we knew from our investment in GitHub, we saw the formation of an executive team that we believe has the horsepower, depth and breadth to become a large and lasting company. Dave’s enterprise and open-source bona fides (GitHub, Hortonworks, SpringSource/VMware, Microsoft), make him the perfect chief executive to harness HashiCorp’s momentum.

Long-Term Outlook

Finally, as a company dedicated to helping enterprises achieve success in a complex and heterogeneous world, the HashiCorp team is setting its sights on building a large and lasting independent company. We have been fortunate enough to work with some of the biggest and best enterprise companies, including AppDynamics, Datadog, GitHub, Mulesoft and Slack. We look forward to partnering with the HashiCorp team and Bessemer, GGV, Mayfield, Redpoint and True to redefine the future of enterprise infrastructure software.

Tom Loverro, Sandy Miller, Steve Harrick, and Michael Miao are Investors at IVP, a later-stage venture capital firm.