Terraform Creator HashiCorp Explores Sale: Report

The vendor has more than 650 system integrator and reseller partners, according to HashiCorp.

Publicly traded developer tools company HashiCorp, best known for its Terraform infrastructure-as-code tool, is reportedly interested in a sale.

Bloomberg reported that a sale is among the options the San Francisco-based vendor has explored with a financial adviser in recent months but a transaction might not happen.

HashiCorp For Sale?

CRN has reached out to HashiCorp for comment. The vendor has more than 650 system integrator and reseller partners, according to HashiCorp.

It was a member of CRN’s 2023 Channel Chiefs but not the 2024 edition. CEO Dave McJannet participated in CRN’s CEO Outlook 2024, saying that the growth of AI is an opportunity for cloud adoption and the work of HashiCorp and its partners.

“Channel partners are an important part of how we do this at HashiCorp, and we look forward to continuing this work in 2024,” he said.

The news comes amid recent major changes at the vendor, including the departure of its namesake co-founder, Mitchell Hashimoto, and switching Terraform from the open-source license it’s operated under since 2014 to a Business Source License (BSL), with the Terraform community starting an open-source version called OpenTofu. OpenTofu became generally available in January.

On March 5, HashiCorp reported a net loss of $48.3 million for its fourth fiscal quarter, using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The loss was an improvement of about 36 percent year over year.

Its operating loss of about $48.3 million for the fourth fiscal quarter was an about 23 percent improvement year over year. HashiCorp forecasted a non-GAAP operating loss between $16 million and $19 million for the current fiscal quarter and between $43 million and $46 million for fiscal year 2025.

Some positive measures from the most recent quarterly earnings include, for the 2024 fiscal year, $583.1 million reported in revenue, an increase of 23 percent year over year. Remaining performance obligation was $775.8 million in the fourth fiscal quarter, up about 20 percent year over year.

On the earnings call, according to a transcript, McJannet said that “optimizations that enterprises undertook over the past 18 months are showing signs of abating and we are seeing early signs of reengagement on new cloud initiatives,” telling analysts on the call “we are on a path back to 20% quarterly revenue growth during FY 2026.”

“Our confidence here comes from tangible proof points during the quarter, specifically improving renewal rates and overall better pipeline conversion,” he said. “This is in line with what we've expected since the start of this cycle, and while there is some ongoing consumption of historical self-managed entitlements among portions of our customer base, the move to cloud is a secular trend with a clearer business need, and there is still a long runway ahead for the largest global enterprises as they mature their cloud efforts.”

HashiCorp’s stock jumped about 13 percent to about $28 a share from Friday to Monday after market close, giving the vendor a market capitalization of about $5.7 billion. The stock had fallen about 2.2 percent in the past year, according to Bloomberg.

A HashiCorp sale would come amid multiple recent high-price tech acquisitions, with Cisco completing its $28 billion purchase of Splunk on Monday and Ahead announcing the purchase of CDI in February.