Dec 9 (Reuters) - HashiCorp Inc's shares rose as much as 11% in their Nasdaq debut on Thursday, valuing the cloud software vendor at nearly $16 billion and marking one of the biggest listings in the enterprise software sector this year.

Investor interest in software companies has grown this year due to the pandemic-driven shift to hybrid working and a sustained demand for remote productivity services.

Enterprise software firms like coding platform GitLab Inc and Freshworks Inc have made strong market debuts this year, fetching valuations of more than $10 billion each.

Co-founded in 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp is an open-source project that provides commercial cloud-based software to clients including Starbucks, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Mercedes-Benz. The company's investors include firms T. Rowe Price, Mayfield, Franklin Templeton and GGV Capital.

The company helps enterprises operate their cloud infrastructure across public cloud platforms run by large tech firms including Amazon, Microsoft and Google .

“Every one of those customers sees that multicloud is an inevitability for them. I think we get to play this critical role to enable those organizations adopt multicloud,” said Dadgar.

Of the company's plans, CEO David McJannet said HashiCorp would continue to focus internationally. "About 25% of our revenue comes internationally. And that's certainly a real growth opportunity for us,” said McJannet said in an interview.

HashiCorp's shares debuted at $81.16 each, compared to their offer price of $80 each, and later rose as high as $89.50.

HashiCorp's valuation tripled from the $5.1 billion after its fundraise in 2020.

The company priced the sale of 15.3 million shares above its targeted range of $68 and $72, raising $1.22 billion.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs & Co and J.P.Morgan were among the underwriters for the HashiCorp offering. (Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru and Echo Wang in Taos, New Mexico; Editing by Vinay Dwivedi, Shailesh Kuber and Cynthia Osterman)