Harness Raises $60M To Accelerate The Pace That Engineers Push Code

Harness, which wants to help engineers push out reliable code faster, launched out of stealth 18 months ago and just snapped up $60 million in a Series B. The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, Google Ventures (GV) and ServiceNow Ventures.

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Existing investors BIG Labs, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures also tagged along in the new round, which brings the company’s total funding to $80 million. The company is valued at $500 million and currently has about 100 employees, Jyoti Bansal, the CEO, said. Bansal’s name might sound familiar: he was previously the founder of AppDynamics, which was sold to Cisco two years ago for $3.7 billion dollars.

The company, co-founded by Bansal and Rishi Singh, uses advanced machine learning and AI to automate software deployments, and automatically rollback if something goes wrong, the press release said. This allows software engineers to roll out new features to customers in hours instead of days (or months), according to Bansal.

Jason Rodriguez, the VP of engineering at SoulCycle, told Crunchbase News that Harness helped reduce deployment and verification time by 90 percent—from one hour to less than 15 minutes. He also noted that SoulCycle is saving about $100K annually when compared to the costs of managing an open-source continuous delivery solution.

The new round will be used to build the 100-person team to 250 people, as well as expand in Europe and Asia.

Matt Murphy of Menlo Ventures, which led Harness’ series A, said Bansal has a sixth sense when it comes to finding pain points and needs in the DevOps world.

On a phone call, Murphy referred to PagerDuty’s recent IPO, which we covered here, as further proof that the market believes in a need for tools that manage and push infrastructure.

Harness’ fresh funding is just another example of the tech world looking for a nontraditional solution to an evergreen problem: to move fast and smart while scaling.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias