The continuous integration and delivery business (CI/CD) has raised $230 million in a series D round of funding, valuing the company at a hefty $3.7 billion.
CI/CD is essentially a combination of "agile" practices that allow multiple developers to make minor changes to a shared code repository and test for product-readiness before manually shipping the code into production environments.
Harness, which is marketed by several companies, is offered "continuous-delivery-as-a-service" which, according to founders, uses machine learning and AI to automate many aspects of the software delivery process, monitor quality, and enable rollbacks to swiftly reverse changes that cause problems. Harness was cofounded in 2016 by Jyoti Bansal, who went on to sell his previous company AppDynamics to Cisco, and who later.
With Harness, Bansal and its subsidiary are betting on the rise in agile software development practices, as well as the simple fact that every business is becoming a software company. This increases the need for tools to automate many of the steps involved, and ensure that bugs do not inadvertently find their way into their live codebase.
A Year of Growth
Harness was a busy 15 months for the company based in San Francisco. On top of that, Harness became its continuous delivery platform; and it enhanced its broader platform with a number of new features.
Harness said its annual revenue rate (ARR) has doubled in the last year, while its internal headcount has nearly tripled to 700. Harness is well-resourced to continue its push into the software development world with more capabilities and tools, though what this ultimately will be.
Weve expanded our platform to include the entire, end-to-end developer experience operations, quality, reliability, cost management, security, and governance in solving larger problems for bigger customers, and assisting them in improving software delivery, Bansal said. Our customers drive our roadmap, and we will continue to listen to them and invest in the platform.
Harness's series D round, which includes $175 million in equity and $55 million in debt, was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with the participation of Alphabet's venture capital division GV, ServiceNow, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Capital One Ventures, Balyasny Asset Management, Gaingels; Harmonic Growth; Unusual Ventures, Citi Ventures; Alkeon Capital; Thomvest Ventures; and Silicon Valley Bank.
