Harness announces $115M in new financing with a $1.7B valuation

Today, Harness announced $115M in new financing with a $1.7B valuation to help build the next platform for software delivery, so every engineering team around the world can deploy software like Google and Facebook.

The latest round is led by Alkeon Capital, along with new investors Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Sorenson Capital, and Thomvest Ventures.

I’d first like to say a huge thank you to our hundreds of paying customers, and to the thousands of community users who have partnered with us since coming out of stealth in 2017. Your confidence and trust in Harness keeps our 300-strong team laser-focused on delivering the best software delivery platform on the planet.

For those of you unfamiliar with Harness, here is a little bit about our mission.

Software Delivery Needs To Change

At our first user conference {unscripted} a few months ago I outlined our vision to evolve software delivery from being complex and slow to be simple and scalable.

At Harness we see software delivery as three distinct generations:

Gen 1 - Software delivery is driven by tickets with dedicated IT operations teams who deploy on behalf of engineering teams. This approach is manual, very slow, and highly inefficient, and didn’t scale when teams moved to modern distributed systems.

Gen 2 - Software delivery is semi-automated with scripts and dedicated DevOps teams who build automation platforms and tooling. As cloud stacks and systems evolve these scripts become out of date, and impossible to maintain and scale, creating TOIL for the engineers who babysit them.

Gen 3 - Software delivery is fully-automated with intelligent pipelines and developer self-service. CI/CD pipelines leverage AI/ML to observe performance, quality, and security so decisions are made in seconds, compressing lead times so developers can deploy on-demand to production, and if need be, can automatically rollback in seconds.

Harness - The Intelligent Software Delivery Platform

In 2017 Harness came out of stealth with the industry’s first Continuous Delivery as-a-Service solution disrupting the status quo of engineers scripting deployment pipelines. What took engineers days or weeks could be built in minutes with our Smart Automation technology. We were also the first vendor to apply AI/ML techniques to APM metrics and log events so engineers could automate deployment verification, and if need be, automatically rollback their services to the previous working version in seconds.

In June last year, we announced GA of our Cloud Cost Management module which provides engineers with cloud cost visibility of their deployments, clusters, and microservices. We now have dozens of paying customers of this new module, with one customer who recently saved $2.92 million in their first 5 months by optimizing the sizing of their Kubernetes clusters.

Harness also announced the acquisition of Drone.io, the industry’s first open-source container-native CI solution.

With this new round of financing, our journey doesn’t stop. We announced at {unscripted} that Harness would be delivering two new modules in early 2021:

• Continuous Integration Enterprise
• Continuous Features

In addition, we would be delivering a next-gen experience for our Continuous Delivery and Continous Verification modules. Together all these modules would deliver a best-of-breed software delivery platform that is self-service, script-free, AI/ML-driven, modular, GitOps-native, and has over 250 supported integrations with your DevOps tooling.

Harness - A Great Place to Work

Our team at Harness is now 300 strong, and is represented across the US, Canada, LATAM, EMEA, Asia, and Australia. I’m thankful to everyone who has contributed to our journey so far, and has built a company culture we can be proud of:

• Be Bold
• Know Your Customers
• Continuously Improve
• Build Trust Thru Transparency
• Stay Humble
• Remember The Human
• Celebrate Together
• Get Ship Done

In the past month Harness has been recognized as a great place to work by Forbes, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and TechCrunch. Here’s where we ranked on these lists:

• #2 on TechCrunch’s top tech startups to work for
• #6 on Glassdoors Best Places Work List for Small and Medium Businesses
• #17 on Forbes Top 50 Cloud Companies to Work For
• #47 on LinkedIn’ Top 50 Companies to Work For

Harness is actively hiring in all areas so please check out our careers page if you are interested in helping us transform the world of software delivery!