HashiCorp announced Sept. 7 a new $24 million Series B round of investment and the general availability of its Vault Enterprise secrets management platform.
The new funding will be used to help grow HashiCorp’s sales, marketing and engineering efforts as the company continues to evolve its DevOps platform. Investors in the Series B funding include GGV Capital, Mayfield, True Ventures and Redpoint, bringing total funding to date for HashiCorp to $34 million. HashiCorp’s last funding event was in December 2014, when the company raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding.
“We’re now starting to see adoption by large enterprises and government groups, so as more mission-critical applications are being built on our tools, we wanted to make sure that we can support those customers,” Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, told eWEEK.
Back in 2014 when HashiCorp raised its Series A round of funding, the company announced the Atlas platform as its primary commercial product. The initial idea behind Atlas was to provide a complete DevOps platform that could help an enterprise from development through deployment.
That strategy has evolved in 2016, as HashiCorp realized it is difficult for organizations to buy and deploy an entire platform. So HashiCorp broke up Atlas into three layers that align to different parts of an organization, according to Dadgar. Its Nomad Enterprise product aligns with development teams to build and ship applications. Terraform Enterprise focuses on operator workloads and how to manage workloads across an infrastructure. And Vault Enterprise, which launched today, focuses on the security engineering team.
HashiCorp’s tools are based on open-source projects the company leads, including Vagrant for development, Packer for code packaging and Terraform for code deployment. In May 2015, HashiCorp launched its Vault project for crypto-key management. Vault Enterprise, which builds on the open-source Vault project, provides a new commercial tool for managing DevOps security.
“Vault over the last 18 months has seen an incredible amount of progress,” Dadgar said. “As people were moving to cloud-based architectures, they were really were not thinking about secrets management.”
Secrets management includes security policies, encryption and cryptographic keys. Dadgar said that Vault now has a highly pluggable model that can enable it to access any type of database as well as cloud APIs. Vault is also now a Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificate authority, enabling organizations to securely deploy and manage SSL/TLS certificates for encrypting data in motion. The Vault Enterprise product is built on top of the open-source project, providing additional workflow features to help organizations manage secrets.
Moving forward, HashiCorp will continue to evolve and mature its existing tools, rather than releasing entirely new products. Dadgar said new features will fit either into development, operations or security categories with the company’s existing products.
“We have seven open-source projects now and three commercial products, and now we’re really focused on maturing and integrating the tools,” he said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
