HashiCorp raked in $175 million in a Series E funding round this week that propelled the company’s valuation to an astonishing $5.1 billion. However, despite that astronomical sum, company executives are focused on business as usual.

The latest funding round was led by Franklin Templeton and included a handful of new and existing investors. Those included funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates and Geodesic Capital, and existing investors GGV Capital, IVP, Mayfield, Redpoint Ventures, and True Ventures.

HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet sounded modest but realistic about the sum raised and corresponding valuation.

“We view these as financing events and we will take our cue from our customers in regards to where we go with it,” McJannet said. “Ultimately, I think we are very focused on playing an enabling role for the biggest companies on the planet, and that has allowed us to build a fairly substantial business and I think the opportunity is clearly there for us to continue to do that.”

While private, HashiCorp said it has posted a 100% year-over-year increase in revenue over the past four years, and has more than doubled its customer base each of those years. The company is targeting the latest investment at expanding its support teams and research and development.

HashiCorp's last funding round was a $100 million Series D in late 2018, which prompted a $1.9 billion valuation. That followed a $40 million Series C in October 2017. The company in total has now raised nearly $350 million in funding since being founded in 2012.

The total, valuation, and series count lead to the obvious question as to where the company goes from here. McJannet again sounded a realistic tone in noting that direction could be the public markets at some point.

“We'll take it and we'll take our cue from our customer, which is we know we play an important role for them and that probably means they're going to want some governance in the public markets at some point but we're certainly not in a rush to do that,” he said.

Having now raised hundreds of millions of dollars in multiple funding rounds would seem to indicate that HashiCorp plays a significant role in the cloud ecosystem. And it does.

The privately-held company offers open source-based software platforms that allow enterprises to manage distributed application infrastructure. Its main automation tools include its Consul service mesh platform, its Terraform infrastructure-as-a-code (IaaS) software, the Vault centralized security management platform, and the Nomad cluster scheduler.

The company is also injecting more cloud-native platforms into its operations, including the ubiquitous Kubernetes integrations. McJannet explained that integration is mostly happening at the top layer of its platform stack where its Nomad cluster scheduler sits. He explained that Kubernetes today is analogous to a modern application server that still needs the infrastructure components provided by platforms like HashiCorp’s other offerings.

McJannet also noted that the Kubernetes model has brought along some challenges for larger enterprises in how they manage their cloud stacks, which is where HashiCorp steps in. It provides a layer that allows those organizations to run their applications in a Kubernetes environment as well as on legacy infrastructure.

This is only mentioned because as confirmed by McJannet, the company’s technology performs a behind-the-scenes, though essential task in getting workloads to production.

“We are an infrastructure company, and infrastructure is sort of like highways of our community or the plumbing inside the building that enables everything else,” McJannet said. “We recognize our role and know we play a big part in helping our customers move their resources around in a cloud environment.”

HashiCorp is most often grouped together with larger cloud-focused vendors like Red Hat and VMware, as well as DevOps and IaaS firms like GitHub, Chef, Puppet, SUSE, Docker, and Rancher Labs. That list includes a number of names that have been aggressive on both ends of the mergers and acquisitions space as well as firms that have had to drastically alter their business models in order to remain ongoing entities.

McJannet noted that these moves fit into what he sees as “technology transitions that happen every 20 years” that are again forcing vendors to re-evaluate their operating model and place in the ecosystem.

“I just think it takes a while for markets to settle out gracefully,” McJannet said. “I think what happens in these market transitions is there's a debate for some period of time as to what's the right way to do ops in the new platform, what's the right way to do security on the new platform, broadly speaking. … I think what's become clear is that the markets have sort of re-standardized at this point on the new vendor stack for that new model. And I think what you see in the market over the last little bit is you see vendors are jockeying for position.”