Harness, a San Francisco-based AI DevOps platform, has secured $240 million in Series E funding, propelling its post-money valuation to $5.5 billion. Goldman Sachs led the investment round, which also saw participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures, and Unusual Ventures.
The funding round comprised a $200 million primary investment and a planned $40 million tender offer aimed at providing liquidity for long-term employees, according to company founder Jyoti Bansal. This new valuation marks a 49% increase from its previous $3.7 billion valuation in April 2022, bringing the company's total equity raised to $570 million to date.
Founded in 2017 by Jyoti Bansal, who previously built and sold AppDynamics, Harness specializes in automating the “after-code” phase of software development. This phase, encompassing testing, security checks, and deployment, reportedly consumes up to 70% of engineering time. Harness utilizes AI agents built on a software delivery knowledge graph to automate these functions, with Bansal stating this graph provides a deep understanding of each customer’s software delivery processes and architecture.
Bansal indicated that the system is designed with human oversight, requiring engineers, compliance teams, or auditors to review AI-generated tests or fixes before implementation. Harness operates in a competitive landscape that includes companies such as Microsoft’s GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, and CloudBees.
The company reports over 1,000 enterprise customers, including United Airlines, Morningstar, Keller Williams, and National Australia Bank. Bansal stated that Harness has facilitated 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. Harness is on track to exceed $250 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, a projection aided by the earlier merger of Bansal’s software observability firm, Traceable, with Harness.
The newly secured capital is designated for expanding research and development efforts, including hiring hundreds of engineers at its Bengaluru office, which is the company's largest development center outside the U.S. Harness also plans to build out additional automated testing, deployment, and security capabilities, enhance the accuracy of its AI systems, strengthen its U.S. go-to-market operations, and expand its international presence. Bansal also stated the company’s long-term goal for an eventual initial public offering, without providing a specific timeline.
