Harness hits $5.5B valuation with $240M raise to automate AI’s ‘after-code’ gap | TechCrunch

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.

“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.

Harness also uses an orchestration engine that turns the AI’s recommendations into automated actions, with checks in place to make sure those changes are applied safely.

As AI is not foolproof, Bansal said the system is designed with human oversight, noting that AI-generated tests or fixes are reviewed by engineers, compliance teams, or auditors before being put into use.

Microsoft’s GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, and CloudBees are among the key competitors for Harness. But Harness has plenty of traction, claiming more than 1,000 enterprise customers, including United Airlines, Morningstar, Keller Williams and National Australia Bank. So far, the startup has handled 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, Bansal touts.

The San Francisco–based company employs over 1,200 people across 14 offices worldwide, including in Europe and the U.K. Around 33% of its workforce is in India, where it has a large engineering team in Bengaluru and a corporate office in Gurugram. Moreover, the Bengaluru site is Harness’s biggest development center outside the U.S.

Harness plans to use the new funding to expand its R&D efforts, hire “hundreds of engineers” at its Bengaluru office, and build out additional automated testing, deployment, and security capabilities while improving the accuracy of its AI systems. The company also intends to strengthen its U.S. go-to-market operations and significantly expand its presence in international markets.

It should also be noted that earlier this year, Bansal merged his software observability firm Traceable with Harness, and that move has helped the startup grow 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,” said 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.”

While this raise has allowed some employees to cash out a bit, Bansal still plans on taking Harness public one day, he said, though he did not share a specific timeline.

“That’s what our goals and plans depend on,” he said 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.”