AI DevOps device Harness, based in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, is on observe to exceed $250 million in annual recurring income in 2025, Bansal tells iinfoai.
The startup simply raised a contemporary $240 million Sequence E funding spherical that values the corporate at $5.5 billion post-money.
The spherical features a $200 million main funding led by Goldman Sachs and a deliberate $40 million tender supply with participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures, and Uncommon Ventures. The tender supply is meant to supply some liquidity to its long-term workers, Bansal mentioned.
The brand new valuation is a 49% bounce from its $3.7 billion valuation in a $230 million spherical in April 2022. With this funding, the startup has raised $570 million of fairness up to now.
As AI accelerates code manufacturing, it’s widening a bottleneck within the far bigger “after-code” section of software program improvement — the testing, safety checks, and deployment work that also consumes practically 70% of engineering time. Harness’s instruments assist automate this sprawling, error-prone layer, whilst enterprises grapple with rising AI code quantity and the dangers of delivery even a single line of defective software program into manufacturing techniques.
Bansal is well-known amongst builders for constructing and promoting app efficiency firm AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017. So the post-coding world is an space Bansal is aware of properly.
Harness makes use of AI brokers to automate features like testing, verification, safety, and governance. It’s constructed on a software program supply data graph that maps code adjustments, providers, deployments, assessments, environments, incidents, insurance policies, and prices. The data graph helps differentiate Harness from different AI platforms, Bansal mentioned, as a result of it offers the system a deep understanding of every buyer’s software program supply processes and structure.
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“This information graph is the context that our AI brokers use,” he instructed iinfoai.
The aim-built brokers draw on that context to generate pipelines that match every buyer’s particular insurance policies, structure, and operational necessities.
Harness additionally makes use of an orchestration engine that turns the AI’s suggestions into automated actions, with checks in place to ensure these adjustments are utilized safely.
As AI isn’t foolproof, Bansal mentioned the system is designed with human oversight, noting that AI-generated assessments or fixes are reviewed by engineers, compliance groups, or auditors earlier than being put into use.
Microsoft’s GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, and CloudBees are among the many key opponents for Harness. However Harness has loads of traction, claiming greater than 1,000 enterprise clients, together with United Airways, Morningstar, Keller Williams, and Nationwide Australia Financial institution. To this point, the startup has dealt with 128 million deployments, 81 million builds, protected 1.2 trillion API calls, and helped clients optimize $1.9 billion in cloud spending over the previous yr, Bansal touts.
The San Francisco–based mostly firm employs over 1,200 individuals throughout 14 workplaces worldwide, together with in Europe and the U.Okay. Round 33% of its workforce is in India, the place it has a big engineering group in Bengaluru and a company workplace in Gurugram. Furthermore, the Bengaluru website is Harness’s greatest improvement middle exterior the U.S.
Harness plans to make use of the brand new funding to increase its R&D efforts, rent “tons of of engineers” at its Bengaluru workplace, and construct out further automated testing, deployment, and safety capabilities whereas bettering the accuracy of its AI techniques. The corporate additionally intends to strengthen its U.S. go-to-market operations and considerably increase its presence in worldwide markets.
It must also be famous that earlier this yr, Bansal merged his software program observability agency Traceable with Harness, and that transfer has helped the startup develop its ARR projection.
“We introduced the 2 firms collectively as a result of we began to see that DevOps and software safety are coming collectively in a really, very deep method,” mentioned Bansal. “We’ve got seen that turned out to be a really, very profitable thesis this yr … that’s driving numerous development for each of our DevOps and software safety set of merchandise.”
Whereas this elevate has allowed some workers to money out a bit, Bansal nonetheless plans on taking Harness public someday, he mentioned, although he didn’t share a particular timeline.
“That’s what our objectives and plans rely on,” he mentioned of an eventual IPO. “Our enterprise may be very, very wholesome, very sturdy, excessive development and margins, and it will likely be a fantastic public firm when the timing is correct.”
