Harness Wrangles Up $3.7B Valuation After $230M Raise As Developer Tools Market Stays Hot

Investors seem keen on helping developers—or at least making sure companies who make those developer tools—remain well funded.

Earlier this morning we wrote about Switzerland-based SonarSource raising a $412 million round that valued the “clean code” platform at $4.7 billion. Not to be outdone, San Francisco-based software delivery platform Harness closed a $230 million Series D at a valuation of $3.7 billion—more than doubling its valuation from January 2021.

The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners and includes $175 million in equity and $55 million in debt financing.

Harness’ platform uses machine learning to allow developers to release applications into production faster by detecting the quality of deployments and automatically identifying failed ones.

After years of receiving around $2 billion or $3 billion annually in investment, VC-backed developer tool companies saw an outpouring of dollars from VCs last year—taking in nearly $9.3 billion, according to Crunchbase.

So far this calendar year, Crunchbase data shows, the space has seen about $1.2 billion of investment.

Harness was co-founded by Jyoti Bansal, who sold his previous company, AppDynamics, for $3.7 billion to Cisco Systems right before it was to go public in 2017.

The company plans to use the new funding to hire and expand its platform. Harness said in a release it has more than doubled its annual revenue rate year to year and has grown from 250 employees in January 2021 to nearly 700 today.

Founded in 2016, the company has raised $425 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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