AI DevOps tool Harness, founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, is on track to exceed $250 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, Bansal tells TechCrunch.
The startup just raised a fresh $240 million Series E funding that values the company at $5.5 billion post-money.
The round includes a $200 million primary investment led by Goldman Sachs and a planned $40 million tender offer with participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures, and Unusual Ventures. The tender offer is intended to provide some liquidity to its long-term employees, Bansal said.
The new valuation is a 49% jump from its $3.7 billion valuation in a $230 million round in April 2022. With this funding, the startup has raised $570 million of equity to date.
As AI accelerates code production, it is widening a bottleneck in the far larger “after-code” phase of software development — the testing, security checks, and deployment work that still consumes nearly 70% of engineering time. Harness’s tools help automate this sprawling, error-prone layer, even as enterprises grapple with rising AI code volume and the risks of shipping even a single line of faulty software into production systems.
Bansal is well known among developers for building and selling app performance company AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017. So the post-coding world is an area Bansal knows well.
Harness uses AI agents to automate functions like testing, verification, security, and governance. It is built on a software delivery knowledge graph that maps code changes, services, deployments, tests, environments, incidents, policies, and costs. The knowledge graph helps differentiate Harness from other AI platforms, Bansal said, because it gives the system a deep understanding of each customer’s software delivery processes and architecture.
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“This knowledge graph is the context that our AI agents use,” he told TechCrunch.
The purpose-built agents draw on that context to generate pipelines that match each customer’s specific policies, architecture and operational requirements.
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