Harness AI Hits $5.5B Valuation in $240M Raise
▼ Summary
– Harness, an AI DevOps startup founded in 2017, is projected to surpass $250 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025 and was recently valued at $5.5 billion after a $240 million Series E funding round.
– The company’s AI platform automates the post-coding phase of software development, like testing, security, and deployment, which consumes about 70% of engineering time, addressing a bottleneck exacerbated by AI-generated code.
– A core differentiator for Harness is its software delivery knowledge graph, which provides context for its AI agents to automate and orchestrate tasks tailored to each customer’s specific architecture and policies, with built-in human oversight.
– Harness serves over 1,000 enterprise customers and has significant global operations, with its largest development center outside the U.S. in Bengaluru, where it plans to hire hundreds of engineers using the new funding.
– The company’s growth has been bolstered by merging with observability firm Traceable, and while it plans for a future IPO, founder Jyoti Bansal emphasizes the timing will depend on achieving the right business conditions.
The AI-powered DevOps platform Harness has secured a substantial $240 million in its latest funding round, catapulting its valuation to an impressive $5.5 billion. Founded by seasoned entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, the company is projecting annual recurring revenue to surpass $250 million in 2025. This new capital infusion, a Series E round, was spearheaded by Goldman Sachs and includes a $40 million tender offer to provide liquidity for long-term team members. The funding marks a significant 49% increase from its previous valuation of $3.7 billion in 2022.
As artificial intelligence dramatically speeds up the initial coding process, it has inadvertently created a major bottleneck in the subsequent stages of software development. The critical work of testing, securing, and deploying code still consumes nearly 70% of engineering resources. Harness directly addresses this challenge by automating this complex and often manual “after-code” phase. Its platform is designed to help enterprises manage the increasing volume of AI-generated code while mitigating the severe risks of deploying faulty software into live production environments.
The core of Harness’s technology is a sophisticated software delivery knowledge graph. This system meticulously maps a customer’s entire ecosystem, including code changes, services, deployments, and security policies. According to Bansal, this deep architectural context is what sets Harness apart, providing the foundation for its AI agents to operate effectively. “This knowledge graph is the context that our AI agents use,” Bansal explained. These purpose-built agents leverage that understanding to automatically generate deployment pipelines and workflows tailored to each organization’s specific requirements.
An orchestration engine then translates the AI’s recommendations into concrete, automated actions, all while incorporating safety checks. Recognizing that AI is not infallible, the platform is built with essential human oversight. Any AI-generated tests, security fixes, or deployment plans are routed for review by engineers or compliance teams before implementation, ensuring reliability and control.
Harness operates in a competitive space alongside tools like Microsoft’s GitHub, GitLab, and Jenkins. However, it has secured considerable market traction with over 1,000 enterprise customers, including prominent names like United Airlines and National Australia Bank. The company reports impressive scale, having managed 128 million deployments, protected 1.2 trillion API calls, and helped customers optimize nearly $2 billion in cloud spending in the past year alone.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Harness employs more than 1,200 people globally. A significant portion of its engineering talent, about 33% of its workforce, is based in India, with its largest development center outside the U.S. located in Bengaluru. The new funding will accelerate research and development, fuel the hiring of hundreds of additional engineers in Bengaluru, and enhance the platform’s automated testing, security, and deployment capabilities. The capital will also support an expansion of its sales operations in the U.S. and key international markets.
A strategic move earlier this year saw Bansal merge his application security company, Traceable, with Harness. This integration reflects the converging domains of DevOps and application security and has contributed positively to the company’s growth projections. “We brought the two companies together because we started to see that DevOps and application security are coming together in a very, very deep way,” Bansal noted, calling the merger a successful driver of growth.
While the recent tender offer provides some early liquidity for employees, Bansal’s long-term vision includes taking Harness public. Although no specific timeline was provided, he expressed confidence in the company’s trajectory, stating, “Our business is very, very healthy, very strong, high growth and margins, and it will be a great public company when the timing is right.”
(Source: TechCrunch)
