HashiCorp promises ‘architectural guidance’ after snagging $175m investment

HashiCorp promises ‘architectural guidance’ after snagging $175m investment

HashiCorp has earned itself a $5.1bn valuation after it wrapped up a $175m series E investment round.

The “funding will accelerate HashiCorp’s focus on enabling multi-cloud infrastructure automation for organizations around the globe that are working to extract the full value of multi-cloud IT environments.“

Jonathan Curtis, vice president of equity research and portfolio manager for technology strategies at Franklin Templeton, said “…we believe HashiCorp has the opportunity to become a foundational infrastructure company, defining and enabling the needs of the largest enterprises as they adopt cloud.” 

The cloud automation vendor said the cash influx would flow towards “the people and programmes that support its customers around the world.”

That means “field, support and customer success organisations” as well as “education, implementation and architectural guidance, and channel and technology partnerships”. Last on the list, comes continuing and expanding “research and development efforts”.

That to do list might seem light on engineering and product development, but on the other hand HashiCorp’s product lineup – the release announcing the investment focuses on Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad – may be widely used, but is not exactly renowned for ease of use.

If the company wants to continue to grow, it has to make its products easier for enterprises to buy and use, or at least make them more digestible for the ecosystem of partners, consultants and resellers, that service enterprises that feeds off enterprises.

As it is, the firm said last month that its revenues grew by 100 per cent in its 2020 fiscal year, with a customer base that includes 100 of the Fortune 500. That announcement came as it unveiled its first chief revenue officer, Brandon Sweeney, a 16 year VMWare veteran.