AI-powered DevOps company Harness has successfully closed a $240 million Series E funding round, elevating its post-money valuation to an impressive $5.5 billion. This new capital injection, led by Goldman Sachs, signals strong investor confidence as the company is on track to surpass $250 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025. The funding underscores the growing market demand for solutions that automate the complex software delivery lifecycle in an era of AI-accelerated code production.
Addressing the Post-Code Bottleneck
The rise of generative AI has significantly increased the speed at which developers can write code, creating a new challenge for engineering teams. This acceleration has widened the bottleneck in the subsequent phases of software development, including testing, security, and deployment. According to founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal, these "after-code" activities still consume nearly 70% of engineering time, representing a major friction point in innovation.
Harness was founded to address this specific problem by automating the sprawling, error-prone layer of the software delivery process. As AI produces more code than teams can manually manage, the platform aims to remove the friction between development and delivery. The company's mission is to ensure that the volume of new code does not overwhelm the systems responsible for shipping it safely and reliably.
An Intelligent Automation Platform
At the core of the Harness platform is a sophisticated software delivery knowledge graph that maps an organization's unique architecture, services, and policies. This model provides deep contextual understanding, which is leveraged by the platform's purpose-built AI agents. This approach allows Harness to generate and automate pipelines that are tailored to each customer's specific operational and governance requirements, setting it apart from competitors.
These AI agents are designed to evaluate, prioritize, and automate critical post-code tasks, from verification to security governance. An orchestration engine then translates the AI's recommendations into safe, consistent actions, with human oversight built into the system. This ensures that engineers or compliance teams can review AI-generated tests and fixes before they are implemented, maintaining control and reliability.
Significant Growth and Market Traction
The latest funding round includes a $200 million primary investment and a planned $40 million tender offer for employees, with participation from existing investors IVP, Menlo Ventures, and Unusual Ventures. This round marks a 49% valuation increase from its $3.7 billion valuation in April 2022, bringing the company's total equity raised to $570 million. The tender offer is designed to provide liquidity for long-term employees.
Harness boasts a roster of over 1,000 enterprise customers, including prominent names like United Airlines, Morningstar, and National Australia Bank. These clients have reported significant improvements, such as a 75% acceleration in deployment times and a 67% reduction in build times. Over the past year, the platform has managed 128 million deployments and helped customers optimize $1.9 billion in cloud spending.
Future Plans and Strategic Expansion
With the new capital, Harness plans to significantly expand its research and development efforts and enhance its AI capabilities. The company intends to hire hundreds of engineers at its Bengaluru office, its largest development center outside the U.S. The funding will also be used to strengthen its go-to-market operations in the United States and accelerate its expansion into international markets.
The company's growth has also been bolstered by the recent merger with Traceable, an application security firm also founded by Bansal, which aligns with the convergence of DevOps and security. While Bansal has expressed long-term ambitions for an IPO, he stated the immediate focus is on sustainable growth. The company's strong financial health positions it to become a great public company when the timing is right.
As AI continues to reshape the first half of software engineering, Harness's latest funding milestone solidifies its position as a critical player in defining the second half. By providing intelligent automation for everything that happens after code is written, the company is empowering engineering teams to deliver software with greater speed and confidence. This investment accelerates its mission to bring clarity and efficiency to the increasingly complex world of software delivery.