Harness Reaches $1.7 Billion Valuation With $115 Million in New Financing

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 14, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Harness, the leading platform for software delivery, today announced that it has raised $115 million in financing, reaching a valuation of $1.7 billion in just three years after launching from stealth. Alkeon Capital led a $85 million Series C round, along with new investors Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Sorenson Capital, and Thomvest Ventures. The total funding includes a $30 million Series B-1 funding round, led by existing investors Menlo Ventures, IVP, and Unusual Ventures. With a total of $195 million in financing to date, Harness will use the funding to grow its world-class engineering team, support global expansion plans, and extend its intelligent software delivery platform vision.

In today's digital economy, every company is a software company. The COVID-19 pandemic cemented this as it forced organizations around the globe to invest in new tools and digital capabilities to support millions of employees' shift to remote work. Demand for these tools will continue to increase: IDC projects that the DevOps market will reach $15 billion in 2023, up from $5.2 billion in 2018. 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 such 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. The company has emerged as a leader helping its customers weather technical and financial challenges brought on by the pandemic. Last year, LogMeIn standardized self-service CI/CD pipelines across engineering teams with Harness Continuous Delivery, saving over a million dollars in engineering productivity. An eDiscovery software company, Relativity, also saved significant costs in annualized cloud spend using Harness' cloud cost management module Continuous Efficiency.

"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," said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. "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." 

The fundraise 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. Additional company accomplishments in 2020 include:

• Hosting its first industry event {unscripted} with more than 4,000 software professionals, with several new platform announcements including Continuous Integration Enterprise, Continuous Features, and next-gen modules for Continuous Delivery and Continuous Verification.
• Acquired leading open-source player Drone.io, entering Harness into the open-source community as the first self-service CI/CD platform for cloud and container-native applications.
• New strategic partnerships across 18 countries and strong enterprise brands including AWS, Google Cloud, AppDynamics, and HashiCorp.
• Named an IDC Innovator for tools accelerating Platform-as-a-Service value for developers
• Named #6 on Glassdoor's Best Places Work List for 2021
• Named #17 on Forbes Top 50 Best Cloud Companies to Work For
• Named a Top 50 Hot Startup to work for by LinkedIn

In addition to today's news, Harness 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 has been in customer-facing technical roles for 20+ years and was most recently a VP of Customer Success with MobileIron, Sauce Labs, and InfluxData. Stephen 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.

Supporting Quotes:

Abhi Arun, Managing Partner at Alkeon Capital
"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."

Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner at Battery Ventures
"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."

Matt Carbonara, Managing Director of Venture Investing at Citi 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."

Rama Sekhar, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners
"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."

Umesh Padval, Venture Partner at Thomvest Ventures
"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."

About Harness
Based in San Francisco, Harness is the only end-to-end platform for intelligent software delivery designed to provide a simple, safe and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight. Harness customers include NCR, Kohl's, Discover Financial, Nationwide Insurance and McAfee. Follow Harness on Twitter or try Harness for free at harness.io.

SOURCE Harness

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