HashiCorp's best-known product, Terraform, let an engineer describe a whole data center in a text file and then build it with one command. That idea, infrastructure as code, spread through companies moving to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. HashiCorp gave much of its software away as open source and sold the enterprise versions. It went public in December 2021 at $80 a share, late in a boom year for software stocks.

Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad

Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar founded HashiCorp, and Dadgar became its chief technology officer in 2013. The company built a family of tools for the cloud. Terraform set up servers and networks. Vault guarded passwords and keys. Consul connected services, and Nomad ran workloads. Its lineup also included Vagrant and Packer. The bet was that companies would run across several clouds at once and want one neutral set of tools for all of them.

Eighty Dollars to IBM

HashiCorp priced its IPO at $80 a share in December 2021 and listed on Nasdaq as HCP. David McJannet was CEO, and Hashimoto had left the board that July but stayed on as an employee. The stock fell sharply as software valuations dropped in 2022. In April 2024 IBM agreed to buy HashiCorp. The deal closed on February 27, 2025, at $35 a share in cash, less than half the IPO price.

Cover: Plowing Oxen, Pieter Dupont. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for oxen plowing a field (terraforming the land).