Photo Credit: Harness
Harness, the first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform in the industry, announced it has raised $60 million in Series B funding led by IVP, GV, and ServiceNow Ventures. Existing investors Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures also participated in this funding round. The company plans to expand investment in R&D and scale its engineering, sales, and customer success teams with this funding round.
As every company becomes a software business, engineering teams are increasingly getting pressured to deliver products to users faster than ever before with zero margins for error. Harness’ mission is to make the practice of continuous delivery accessible to every business — which will empower software teams to move fast and ship without the fear of failed deployments. Using advanced machine learning and AI, Harness is automating software deployments and analyze quality. And then it automatically rolls back changes if something goes wrong.
Harness was founded by Jyoti Bansal and Rishi Singh. Bansal is known for being the former CEO and founder of AppDynamics, an application monitoring company that was acquired Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017. And Singh is a former DevOps and platform at Apple.
“We were not actively seeking new investment at this point, but our strong market traction created heavy investor interest in Harness, resulting in a fast-moving and heavily oversubscribed Series B round,” said Harness CEO and co-founder Jyoti Bansal. “We are thrilled to partner with world-leading investment and technology firms — IVP, GV, and ServiceNow — as we continue to build Harness into the next major software platform company.”
Ever since Harness launched from stealth in October 2017, the company has grown at a rapid pace. And it has helped customers like McAfee, Home Depot, SoulCycle, Bank of Santander, NCR, and Beachbody improve their ability to deliver software changes in modern container architectures.
“Our legacy continuous delivery process didn’t work in a modern microservices environment, and we selected Harness because it was a scalable, cloud-hosted platform designed with Kubernetes in mind,” explained Rajeshwari Zala — Director of Software Engineering at Ruckus Networks (Ruckus and Arris have joined Commscope). “With Harness, we’ve given our developers the ability to perform their own software deployments without much oversight from DevOps — freeing Ruckus Networks from having to invest in a large build and release team.”
Customers have seen immediate gains with Harness and they have seen a reduction in deployment times from many weeks to just hours. Plus there has been a reduction of deployment-related errors by 95-99% and there was a 3-4x increase in DevOps team efficiency.
“Harness represents a tremendous opportunity to create the next multi-billion dollar company. The team has a powerful vision to redefine the software delivery process using automation and machine learning, and the company’s market momentum is significantly beyond what we typically see in companies at this stage,” added IVP general partner Steve Harrick. “We were fortunate to be investors in Jyoti Bansal’s previous company AppDynamics, and believe that Jyoti and the all-star team assembled at Harness have the ability to revolutionize software delivery within the enterprise.”
Over the last year, Harness has won a number of awards such as the Gartner 2018 DevOps Cool Vendor and the 2018 Barclays Innovation Challenge. And Harness recently announced it joined the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) — which is a new foundation launched by the Linux Foundation in March 2019 for supporting collaboration around continuous delivery.
“Harness has helped Advanced and our hundreds of developers transform to a modern Continuous Delivery organization in a matter of months, while we had expected the process to take years,” commented Advanced’s Head of DevOps Martin Reynolds. “The ROI — where do I start? We’ve seen an 88% reduction in the average time it takes to deploy new code — from 2 days to 2 hours — a 90% reduction in the amount of time it takes to onboard new developers, and a 10x return on investment overall.”
Harness also recently announced it teamed with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service to cloud-native apps and it is available for purchase on the AWS Marketplace. And Harness also partnered with Google Cloud Platform to bring Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service to Kubernetes apps running in Google Cloud along with purchase availability on GCP Marketplace.
One of Harness’ notable recent hires is Jason Eubanks as the chief revenue officer. Eubanks was formerly the Global Vice President Sales, Services, and Alliances at Twilio and former Senior Director of Worldwide Field Sales at Cisco Meraki.
“Harness delivers artificial intelligence to DevOps with thoughtful automation of key components of the software engineering workflow,” noted GV general partner Adam Ghobarah. “With a mission driven by Jyoti Bansal and an incredibly strong founding team, Harness has the right team and technology in place to tackle some of the most complex challenges in software development and delivery.”
