AI DevOps software Harness, based in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, is on monitor to exceed $250 million in annual recurring income in 2025, Bansal tells TechCrunch.
The startup simply raised a contemporary $240 million Collection E funding that values the corporate at $5.5 billion post-money.
The spherical features a $200 million major 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 offer some liquidity to its long-term staff, Bansal mentioned.
The brand new valuation is a 49% soar 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 thus far.
As AI accelerates code manufacturing, it’s widening a bottleneck within the far bigger “after-code” part of software program growth — 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, at the same time as enterprises grapple with rising AI code quantity and the dangers of transport even a single line of defective software program into manufacturing methods.
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 effectively.
Harness makes use of AI brokers to automate capabilities like testing, verification, safety, and governance. It’s constructed on a software program supply information graph that maps code modifications, companies, deployments, checks, environments, incidents, insurance policies, and prices. The information graph helps differentiate Harness from different AI platforms, Bansal mentioned, as a result of it provides the system a deep understanding of every buyer’s software program supply processes and structure.
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“This knowledge graph is the context that our AI agents use,” he informed TechCrunch.
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 modifications are utilized safely.
As AI is just not foolproof, Bansal mentioned the system is designed with human oversight, noting that AI-generated checks 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 prospects, 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 prospects optimize $1.9 billion in cloud spending over the previous yr, Bansal touts.
The San Francisco–based mostly firm employs over 1,200 folks 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 growth heart exterior the U.S.
Harness plans to make use of the brand new funding to develop its R&D efforts, rent “hundreds of engineers” at its Bengaluru workplace, and construct out extra automated testing, deployment, and safety capabilities whereas bettering the accuracy of its AI methods. The corporate additionally intends to strengthen its U.S. go-to-market operations and considerably develop its presence in worldwide markets.
It also needs to 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 brought the two companies together because we started to see that DevOps and application security are coming together in a very, very deep way,” mentioned Bansal. “We have seen that turned out to be a very, very successful thesis this year … that’s driving a lot of growth for both of our DevOps and application security set of products.”
Whereas this elevate has allowed some staff to money out a bit, Bansal nonetheless plans on taking Harness public in the future, he mentioned, although he didn’t share a particular timeline.
“That’s what our goals and plans depend on,” he mentioned of an eventual IPO. “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.”
