HashiCorp Secures $40 Million In A Funding Round That Will Boost Its Channel Program

HashiCorp, a San Francisco-based startup behind a set of open source DevOps tools now surging in adoption, said it secured $40 million funding round Tuesday that will partially boost an emerging partner program.

The developer of cloud-agnostic solutions has raised $74 million in total since its founding in 2012. The company's solutions – including Vagrant, Consul, Vault, Nomad, and Terraform – are increasingly used to accelerate application delivery, implement security and manage the lifecycle across complex hybrid infrastructure.

The latest round was led by GGV Capital and Redpoint Ventures.

[Related: Microsoft Commits To Long-Term Development Plan With HashiCorp]

Last month, HashiCorp introduced its first channel program to cement relationships with a growing set of systems integrators already leveraging its technology, and start working with new partners.

HashiCorp plans to use the $40 million to accelerate investment across its go-to-market, engineering, and customer success teams, Jen Murphy, HashiCorp's vice president of worldwide channels, told CRN.

Partners are an integral part of HashiCorp's efforts to make customers successful by offering services around its product suite across the world, she said.

"Partners will see a lot of immediate benefits from our increasing investments. They will see more HashiCorp team members dedicated to their enablement, a larger field organization to engage within accounts, and a growing customer success team to support these partners and our joint customers," Murphy told CRN.

HashiCorp's technology was born in a college dorm room, but years of steadily ramping enterprise adoption have pushed the ever-expanding open source portfolio into the arms of the channel.

The company launched the HashiCorp Partner Network in response to demand from customers and opportunistic implementers. That program offers one track for resellers, another for systems integrators bringing to market its DevOps tools.

Partners say driving rapid HashiCorp adoption is the agnostic nature of its tools, which deliver to enterprises consistent workflow for provisioning and securing infrastructure from multiple public cloud providers.

Nebulaworks, a systems integrator based in Irvine, Calif., has been working with HashiCorp's tools since they first became available.

CEO Chris Ciborowski told CRN HashiCorp outlined a "great plan for partners" at its recent HashiConf 2017 conference that should be propelled by the latest funding round.

And there's a lot HashiCorp can do to further boost its emerging partner community, Nebulaworks' CEO said.

"One of the areas that would help bolster resell partner efforts would be to provide a platform to connect VARs and SI partners to foster collaboration," Ciborowski told CRN.

Extracting the most value from HashiCorp tools requires programming experience, an area in which VARs are typically weak, but most consulting partners are well-versed.

"Connecting partners together provides numerous benefits, the most important being all parties involved benefit from successful sales and services engagements," he told CRN.