An Ikea desk to the standard for cloud infra
HashiCorp was founded in 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, classmates from the University of Washington's computer science program, reportedly working from an Ikea desk in Dadgar's apartment. The company built a suite of open-source tools that became the default vocabulary of modern cloud operations: Vagrant for dev environments, Packer for image building, Terraform for infrastructure-as-code, Consul for service networking, Vault for secrets management, and Nomad for workload scheduling. Terraform in particular became the de facto way teams provisioned cloud resources, and the tools' permissive Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0) helped them spread across the industry.
The open-source IPO
HashiCorp commercialized its open-source tools through a paid 'open core' model and enterprise and cloud editions. Revenue reached about $211.9M in the fiscal year ended January 2021, up roughly 75%. On December 9, 2021, the company listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker HCP, pricing its IPO at $80 per share for gross proceeds of about $1.22B and a valuation around $14B; the first-day close pushed its market capitalization toward $15B and made both founders billionaires on paper. It was one of the marquee open-source IPOs of the 2021 cycle.