Armon Dadgar, the 28-year-old co-founder of cloud computing unicorn HashiCorp, only graduated seven years ago from the University of Washington, but he’s already committed to giving back millions to the school that helped shape his success.
The UW announced this week that Dadgar and his partner Joshua Kalla are helping to establish a Scholarship for Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) Students in their name in the amount of $3.6 million, awarded over 12 years to the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity (OMA&D).
Dadgar graduated with a degree in computer science in 2011 and co-founded San Francisco-based HashiCorp in 2012 alongside fellow UW grad Mitchell Hashimoto. The company raised $100 million to reach a valuation of $1.9 billion near the end of last year. Its products help software developers and infrastructure operators deploy applications across multiple environments, including public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services or homegrown infrastructure.
“In life there are very few silver bullets but I think education might be one of the very few that exist,” Dadgar said in a UW news release. “It’s hard to overstate the value of it. Our educations, especially the research opportunities outside the classroom, have been transformational to both Josh and me. We wanted to target this scholarship towards students underrepresented in higher education and ensure they were given the same immersive opportunities we had.”
Kalla is an assistant professor of political science and statistics and data science at Yale University.
The UW said the scholarship will be aimed at underrepresented minority, economically disadvantaged and first-generation college students. The gift commitment is intended to cover room, board, tuition and related expenses until the student graduates and can be applied to any field of study the student chooses.
“This transformational gift commitment will have an immediate impact on the lives of our students, as well as their families and communities,” Rickey Hall, UW’s vice president for Minority Affairs & Diversity and University Diversity Officer, said in a statement. “We are incredibly grateful that Armon and Joshua recognize the needs of students to have access to a UW education. Their contribution speaks to the significance of OMA&D’s work, as well as greater diversity efforts across our campus communities.”
