Last week HashiCorp went public, raising more than $1.2 billion and ending the week with a $15.3 billion valuation. Not bad for a company that gives away software for free. (The company made more than $211 million last year from open source.) HashiCorp’s open source tools such as Terraform, Vagrant, and Consul enable enterprises to automate and manage their cloud infrastructure. Quite often, they are used more often than the homegrown infrastructure automation services the clouds offer.
This is one reason it’s worth wondering which of the big technology companies is going to regret it most when HashiCorp gets bought and not by them.
There are plenty of reasons to bet against HashiCorp getting bought, but also tens of millions of developer-driven reasons to suggest that it would be worth whatever it might cost. Like GitHub (acquired by Microsoft in 2018), HashiCorp could offer an on-ramp to a company’s cloud services.