Harness, an AI devOps tool founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, is on track to exceed $250 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, Bansal told TechCrunch.
The startup recently raised new Series E funding of $240 million, valuing the company post-money at $5.5 billion.
The round includes a primary investment of $200 million led by Goldman Sachs and a planned tender offering of $40 million with participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures. The tender offer is aimed at providing some liquidity to its long-term employees, Bansal said.
The new valuation is 49% higher than the $3.7 billion valuation of the $230 million round in April 2022. With this funding, the startup has raised $570 million in equity to date.
As AI code accelerates into production, it is hitting a bottleneck in the larger “after-code” phase of software development – the testing, security checks and deployment tasks that still consume about 70% of engineering time. Harness’s tools help automate this huge, error-prone layer, even as enterprises grapple with increasing AI code volume and the risk of shipping even a single line of faulty software into production systems.
Bansal is best known among developers for selling app performance company AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017. So the post-coding world is an area Bansal knows well.
Harness uses AI agents to automate tasks like testing, verification, security, and governance. It is built on a software delivery knowledge graph that maps code changes, services, deployments, tests, environments, events, policies, and costs. The knowledge graph helps differentiate Harness from other AI platforms, Bansal said, because it gives the system a deep understanding of each customer’s software delivery processes and architecture.
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“This knowledge graph is the context that our AI agents use,” he told TechCrunch.
Purpose-built agents create pipelines using context that matches each customer’s specific policies, architecture, and operational requirements.
Harness also uses an orchestration engine that turns AI recommendations into automated actions, as well as checks to make sure those changes are implemented safely.
Since AI is not foolproof, Bansal said the system is designed with human oversight in mind, noting that AI-generated tests or fixes are reviewed by engineers, compliance teams or auditors before being put into use.
Microsoft’s GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins and CloudBees are among Harness’s major competitors. But Harness has plenty of appeal, boasting more than 1,000 enterprise customers, including United Airlines, Morningstar, Keller Williams and National Australia Bank. Bansal reported that to date, the startup has secured 128 million deployments, 81 million builds, 1.2 trillion API calls, and helped customers optimize $1.9 billion in cloud spend over the past year.
The San Francisco-based company employs more than 1,200 people in 14 offices around the world, including Europe and the UK. About 33% of its workforce is based in India, where it has a large engineering team in Bengaluru and a corporate office in Gurugram. Additionally, the Bengaluru site is Harness’s largest development center outside the US.
Harness plans to use the new funding to expand its R&D efforts, hire “hundreds of engineers” in its Bengaluru office, and build additional automated testing, deployment, and security capabilities while improving the accuracy of its AI systems. The company also intends to strengthen its US go-to-market operations and significantly expand its presence in international markets.
It should also be noted that earlier this year, Bansal merged his software observability firm Traceable with Harness, and that move has helped the startup increase its ARR projection.
“We brought the two companies together because we started to see DevOps and application security coming together in a much deeper way,” Bansal said. “We’ve seen that prove to be a very successful thesis this year… driving a lot of growth for both our DevOps and application security set of products.”
While the raise has allowed some employees to cash out some cash, Bansal still plans to take Harness public one day, he said, though he did not share a specific timeline.
“Our goals and plans hinge on this,” he said of the eventual IPO. “Our business is very healthy, very strong, high growth and margins, and will be a great public company when the time is right.”
