Infrastructure-as-code technology firm HashiCorp Inc. beat expectations in its latest financial results today as it announced spending cuts and an 8% reduction in its workforce.

But its guidance for the second quarter came up light, sending its stock way lower in extended trading.

The company reported a fiscal first-quarter net loss of $53.3 million, improving from a loss of $78.2 million one year earlier. Its loss before certain costs such as stock compensation came to seven cents per share, beating the consensus estimate of a 14-cent-per-share loss. Revenue rose 37% from a year ago, to $138 million, ahead of the $133.1 million forecast by Wall Street analysts.

They were decent numbers, but the good work quickly came undone as HashiCorp revealed its guidance for the coming quarter. It said it’s expecting a loss of between 14 and 16 cents per share on revenue of between $137 million and $139 million. Both numbers came up short of Wall Street’s target of a loss of 12 cents per share on revenue of $141.4 million.

HashiCorp’s stock, which fell 2% during the regular trading session, promptly nosedived more than 22% after-hours.

Chief Executive Dave McJannet (pictured) said the company remains focused on its role as a partner to the Global 2000 as it transitions to the cloud. “Despite the difficult macroeconomic environment, we saw meaningful progress with new customers in the first quarter,” he said. “And while we saw pressure in the buying process, the large number of new customers gives us ongoing confidence in both the market trend of cloud adoption and our ability to deliver value helping large enterprises operate their cloud infrastructure.”

Initially created as a research project at the University of Washington, HashiCorp sells automation software for enterprise technology infrastructure. Its main product is Terraform, which enables “infrastructure as code,” where system administrators write scripts to automate the configuration of cloud and on-premises systems.

Terraform makes life much simpler than the old way of doing things, which involved navigating various consoles to configure systems manually. It eliminated the need to configure and adjust hundreds of settings manually, helping administrators save hours of work.

It’s a strong product that is seeing growing adoption. HashiCorp said it ended the quarter with 4,392 paying customers, up from 4,131 at the end of the previous quarter and 3,240 one year earlier. Of those customers, 830 are bringing in at least $100,000 in annual revenue each year, HashiCorp said, up from 798 a year earlier.

The company also announced quarterly subscription revenue of $16.5 million, up from $8.8 million a year earlier.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE he thought HashiCorp did well in the quarter, with its revenue growing despite tough economic conditions. “HashiCorp’s growth is fueled by an enterprise need to manage software with software, there’s a lot of demand for it,” the analyst said.

Despite increasing its customer base and revenue, HashiCorp said it’s exercising caution amid the ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty it faces. The company is planning to reduce its workforce by about 8%, while announcing targeted cuts in its discretionary spending.

“Although it’s still growing, it’s doing so at a slower rate than in the previous year,” Mueller continued. “It made progress on cutting its costs too, but not by enough, so an 8% workforce reduction is coming. The management is hoping that the job cuts and reduced spending, along with further growth, will be enough to see HashiCorp break even for the full year, and that’s what investors also want to see.”

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