HashiCorp Inc., the information technology automation firm that went public in December, delivered encouraging results today in its first earnings report as a publicly traded company.

The company reported a fourth-quarter loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 24 cents per share on revenue of $96.5 million, up 56% from the same period one year ago. That amounted to a net loss of $227.7 million, compared with a loss of just $6.9 million one year before.

The performance was better than expected, with Wall Street modeling a 25-cent loss on much lower revenue of $85.8 million. For fiscal 2022, HashiCorp delivered total revenue of $320.7 million, up from just $211.8 million in fiscal 2021.

HashiCorp Chief Executive Dave McJannet (pictured) said the “strong results” illustrate how his company is continuing to deliver on its vision of a cloud operating model that enables enterprises to execute their multicloud strategies more easily.

HashiCorp sells software that’s used by enterprises to automate the management of their information technology infrastructure. Its flagship product is Terraform, an infrastructure-as-code offering that enables system administrators to write scripts to define the configuration of cloud and on-premises IT infrastructure, instead of navigating through management consoles.

Terraform eliminates the need to configure and adjust hundreds of settings manually. HashiCorp claims it can save weeks of work for administrators in some cases. It also reduces the risk of human error.

“We see enterprises looking for consistent workflows and a system of record for operating their cloud infrastructure, and it’s gratifying to see them turning to HashiCorp’s offerings as a result,” McJannet said. “We added 323 new customers during the fourth quarter, including 60 customers with equal to or greater than $100,000 in ARR, now totaling 655, up from 500 in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021.”

The company offered several encouraging metrics, including a net dollar revenue retention rate of 131% at the end of the quarter, up from 127% in the year ago period. NRR is a measure of how much a company’s annual recurring revenue has grown or shrunk over time by factoring in customer expansion as well as churn and downgrades.

HashiCorp also reported remaining performance obligations of $428.8 million, up 62% from a year ago. RPO represents the total future performance obligations arising from a company’s contractual relationships. More specifically, RPO is the sum of the invoiced amount and the future amounts not yet invoiced for a contract with a customer.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that HashiCorp is in full growth mode, with revenue up more than 50% indicating that its growth over the past couple of years wasn’t just the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as has been the case for many other tech companies. He said the company’s rising losses were the result of its “spending like a drunken sailor” to grow its business in its first year as a public company.

“HashiCorp’s net loss per share is up more than 150% from where it was a year ago,” Mueller said. “For now investors seem to be fine with this as the price of growth, but sooner or later the team around Dave McJanney will have to better balance revenue and growth with expenditures. For now, all eyes will be watching its growth in the first quarter.”

For the fiscal first quarter, HashiCorp is looking for revenue of between $92 million and $96 million, ahead of Wall Street’s forecast of $89.4 million in sales. For fiscal 2023, HashiCorp expects total revenue of $413 million to $423 million, comfortably ahead of the consensus estimate of $405.5 million.

HashiCorp raised $1.2 billion through its initial public offering in December and it’s widely seen as one of the most promising cloud software startups to have emerged in recent years. Despite its potential, the company’s stock has fallen a long way from its IPO price of $80 per share. In today’s regular trading session it lost more than 10% of its value, before clawing back a couple of percentage points after-hours.

Photo: HashiCorp/YouTube