AI DevOps tool Harnessfounded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, is on track to surpass $250 million in annual recurring revenue by 2025, Bansal tells TechCrunch.
The startup just raised a new $240 million Series E funding round that values the company at $5.5 billion post-money.
The round includes a lead investment of $200 million led by Goldman Sachs and a planned offering of $40 million with participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures. The auction is meant to provide some liquidity to its longtime employees, Bansal said.
The new valuation is a 49% jump from that valuation of $3.7 billion in a $230 million round in April 2022. With this funding, the startup has raised $570 million in equity to date.
As AI accelerates code production, it widens a bottleneck in the much larger “post-code” phase of software development—the testing, security checks, and development tasks that still consume nearly 70% of engineering time. Harness’s tools help automate this extensive, error-prone layer, even as businesses grapple with the growing volume of AI code and the risks of sending even a single line of faulty software into production systems.
Bansal is well-known among developers for creating and selling application performance company AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017. So the world of transcoding is an area Bansal knows well.
Harness uses AI agents to automate functions such as 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 processes and software delivery architecture.
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“This knowledge graph is the framework that our AI agents use,” he told TechCrunch.
Custom-built agents build on this framework to build pipelines that match each customer’s specific policies, architecture, and operational requirements.
Harness also uses an orchestration engine that turns AI recommendations into automated actions, with checks to make sure those changes are implemented safely.
As AI is not infallible, Bansal said the system is designed with human oversight, noting that AI-generated tests or fixes are reviewed by engineers, compliance teams or auditors before they go live.
Microsoft’s GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, and CloudBees are among Harness’s main competitors. But Harness has plenty of traction, claiming more than 1,000 corporate clients, including United Airlines, Morningstar, Keller Williams and National Australia Bank. So far, the startup has handled 128 million deployments, 81 million builds, secured 1.2 trillion API calls and helped customers optimize $1.9 billion in cloud spend over the past year, Bansal reports.
The San Francisco-based company employs over 1,200 people in 14 offices around the world, including Europe and the UK. Additionally, the Bengaluru location is Harness’ largest development center outside the US
Harness plans to use the new funding to expand its R&D efforts, hire “hundreds of engineers” at its Bangalore office, and build additional automated testing, development and security capabilities while improving the accuracy of its AI systems. The company also plans to strengthen its operations in the US and significantly expand its presence in international markets.
It should also be noted that earlier this year Bansal merged software tracking company Traceable with Harness, and this move helped the startup grow ARR’s visibility.
“We brought the two companies together because we started to see DevOps and application security coming together in a very, very deep way,” Bansal said. “We’ve seen that prove to be a very, very successful thesis this year … leading to a lot of growth for both DevOps products and the application security product suite.”
While that raise allowed some employees to cash in a bit, Bansal still plans to take Harness public one day, he said, though he didn’t share a specific timeline.
“Our goals and plans depend on it,” he said of a potential IPO. “Our business is very, very healthy, very strong, high growth and margins, and will be a great public company when the time is right.”
