- Harness — a leading platform for software delivery — announced it raised $115 million in funding at a valuation of $1.7 billion. These are the details.
Harness — a leading platform for software delivery — announced it raised $115 million in funding at a valuation of $1.7 billion. Alkeon Capital led the $85 million Series C round of funding along with new investors Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Sorenson Capital, and Thomvest Ventures.
This total funding round also includes a $30 million Series B-1 funding round led by existing investors Menlo Ventures, IVP, and Unusual Ventures. And with a total of $195 million in funding to date, Harness will use the funding to grow its engineering team, support global expansion plans, and extend its intelligent software delivery platform vision.
The pandemic has been forcing organizations around the globe to invest in new tools and digital capabilities for supporting millions of employees’ shift to remote work. And the demand for these tools will continue to increase as IDC projects that the DevOps market will reach $15 billion in 2023, up from $5.2 billion in 2018. And for the world’s 25 million software developers, a platform that empowers them to deliver code quickly, reliably and efficiently is more valuable than ever.
Since 2017, Harness’ vision has been to create a software delivery platform based on empowering developers with self-service and intelligent automation so they can simplify how they build, test, deploy, and optimize code. And the company has emerged as a leader helping its customers weather technical and financial challenges brought on by the pandemic.
Last year, LogMeIn had standardized self-service CI/CD pipelines across engineering teams with Harness Continuous Delivery, saving over a million dollars in engineering productivity. And eDiscovery software company Relativity also saved significant costs in annualized cloud spend using Harness’ cloud cost management module Continuous Efficiency.
This funding comes on the heels of remarkable growth for Harness in 2020 with a 200% increase in ARR over 2019 and a 246% growth in customers over 2019 with new sign ons including National Bank of Canada, UK Home Office, and Citigroup.
And Harness recently announced two executive hires to continue the company’s fast customer growth and global expansion: Manuel “Manny” Ruiz as SVP Customer Success, and Stephen Line as VP EMEA Field Sales and GM. Manny was in customer-facing technical roles for over 20 years and was most recently a VP of Customer Success with MobileIron, Sauce Labs, and InfluxData. And Line joined Harness from Cloudera where he was the first sales rep hired in the region and had the privilege of leading the EMEA organization as they scaled the business to 70 sellers in 18 countries with customers in 65 countries.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our goal is to create an intelligent software delivery platform that allows every company in the world to become as good in software delivery as the likes of Google and Facebook. Our investors believe strongly in our vision of an end-to-end platform for software delivery, and we look forward to partnering with these leading investment firms as we build Harness into the next major software company.”
— Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness
“Harness is revolutionizing the software delivery landscape with an end-to-end platform that is accelerating the rate at which businesses around the world can innovate and compete,” said Abhi Arun, Managing Partner at Alkeon Capital. “Cutting edge companies like AWS are deploying new software every 12 seconds. With Harness, this capability is now available to the Global 2,000 and to any software developer who is looking to scale and accelerate their time-to-market. Jyoti is a once in a generation entrepreneur, who has built a multi-billion dollar franchise in the DevOps market, previously with AppDynamics for APM, and now with Harness for CI/CD and software delivery.”
— Abhi Arun, Managing Partner at Alkeon Capital
“Battery is extremely excited once again to partner with Jyoti and the team at Harness as they look to redefine the DevOps landscape,” said Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures. “Jyoti’s vision and ability to execute is second to none. I firmly believe Harness will disrupt the software delivery market, and become a category leader, just like we experienced back in 2014 with our AppDynamics partnership.”
— Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner at Battery Ventures
“Enterprises must invest in their developers’ productivity by bringing in tools and services that enhance programming workflows,” explained Matt Carbonara, Managing Director of Venture Investing at Citi Ventures. “We see an incredible amount of opportunity in the DevOps space and are particularly excited by the tools Harness is deploying to empower developers. We are thrilled to add Harness to the Citi Ventures portfolio and look forward to supporting the team as it expands its scope and reach.”
— Matt Carbonara, Managing Director of Venture Investing at Citi Ventures
“It is rare to meet founders with the clarity of thought, vision, and enterprise track record that Jyoti has, so we jumped on the opportunity to partner with him on Harness,” said Rama Sekhar, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “At the core of every product decision at Harness is the goal of making developers’ lives easier. The team has an expansive vision to automate and streamline every step of the software delivery process, and their laser-focus on empowering customers at all stages of digital transformation has resulted in best of class momentum and execution that is beyond what we typically see of companies at this stage.”
— Rama Sekhar, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners
“We are thrilled to be an investor in Harness and a partner to successful entrepreneur and CEO, Jyoti Bansal,” said Umesh Padval, Venture Partner at Thomvest Ventures. “A strong proven management team coupled with a best-in-class integrated DevOps platform dramatically accelerating the software development and release process in a massive market made it an easy investment decision for us.”
— Umesh Padval, Venture Partner at Thomvest Ventures
