Harness, an AI DevOps tool founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, is projected to surpass $250 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025. The startup recently secured a $240 million Series E funding round, valuing the company at $5.5 billion post-money. This round includes a $200 million primary investment led by Goldman Sachs and a $40 million tender offer with participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures, and Unusual Ventures. The tender offer is designed to provide liquidity for long-term employees.
This new valuation represents a 49 percent increase from its $3.7 billion valuation in April 2022. To date, Harness has raised $570 million in equity funding.
As artificial intelligence accelerates code production, it creates a bottleneck in the subsequent phases of software development—the testing, security, and deployment work that still consumes nearly 70 percent of engineering time. Harness aims to automate this complex and error-prone layer, helping enterprises manage rising AI-generated code volume and the risks of deploying faulty software.
Founder Jyoti Bansal is known for building and selling AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017, giving him deep expertise in the post-coding domain.
Harness employs AI agents to automate functions like testing, verification, security, and governance. Its system is built on a software delivery knowledge graph that maps code changes, services, deployments, tests, environments, incidents, policies, and costs. This knowledge graph provides the AI agents with crucial context, differentiating Harness by giving it a deep understanding of each customer’s unique software delivery processes and architecture.
Purpose-built agents use this context to generate pipelines that match specific customer policies and architectural needs. An orchestration engine then turns AI recommendations into automated actions, with built-in safety checks.
Recognizing that AI is not infallible, the system is designed for human oversight. All AI-generated tests or fixes are reviewed by engineers or compliance teams before implementation.
Harness competes with platforms like Microsoft’s GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, and CloudBees. It has gained significant traction with over 1,000 enterprise customers, including United Airlines, Morningstar, Keller Williams, and National Australia Bank. The platform has handled 128 million deployments, 81 million builds, protected 1.2 trillion API calls, and helped customers optimize $1.9 billion in cloud spending over the past year.
The San Francisco-based company employs over 1,200 people across 14 global offices. Approximately 33 percent of its workforce is in India, where it maintains a large engineering hub in Bengaluru, its biggest development center outside the United States.
The new funding will be used to expand research and development, hire hundreds of engineers in Bengaluru, and build enhanced automated testing, deployment, and security capabilities while improving AI accuracy. The company also plans to strengthen its U.S. go-to-market operations and expand significantly in international markets.
Earlier this year, Bansal merged his software observability firm Traceable with Harness. This merger has contributed to the startup’s growing annual recurring revenue projection by uniting DevOps and application security, a combination Bansal notes is driving substantial growth for both product sets.
While this funding round provides some employee liquidity, Bansal maintains plans to take Harness public. He states the business is healthy, strong, and high-growth, and will become a great public company when the timing is right.