Helping Enterprises Gain an 'Easy Button' for Continuous Delivery: Announcing Harness Series B Financing
Today is a big milestone day for us at Harness. We’re excited to announce our $60 million Series B round led by IVP, as well as two strategic investors - GV and ServiceNow Ventures, and with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures. This $60 million round will be used to capitalize on what has been an outstanding journey for Harness.Our mission: Simplify software deliveryWe started Harness with a bold vision. There are twenty million software developers in the world, and almost two trillion dollars each year are spent on software development. Even though every business has become a software business, almost everyone is struggling with software delivery. A software delivery process that’s continuous, reliable, secure, risk-free and drama-free simply didn’t exist. We started Harness with the mission to simplify software delivery for the twenty million software developers of the world by bringing industry’s first Continuous-Delivery-as-a-Service platform to the market.How we measure ourselves: Happy successful customersSince we launched Harness product in the market in Feb 2018, it has been a breathtaking ride for us. We have rapidly grown our customer base, spanning the range from mid-sized companies to some of the largest enterprises on the planet, making Harness one of the fastest growing enterprise software startups. But the single biggest way we measure our success as a company is how we help our customers being very successful in their Continuous Delivery and DevOps initiatives, and help transform how they do business.Here are just a few examples:NCR had to move from a traditional monolithic environment to microservices in record time, and Harness was a bridge that ensured success. They moved from 1 week to same day time-to-market of software changes, going from 40 to 640 deploys a week. Firefighting went from 300 hours to just a few hours.Bank of Santander also had a highly laborious delivery process, and Harness cut down both time and the resources required to manage it. They went from 4-6 hours and up to 15 engineers to deploy down to 1 hour and 1 developer to deploy. Rollbacks went from 2-3 hours to 5-10 minutes. The time and people savings were enormous.We have many dozens of happy successful customers, many of them sharing their stories on video here:iHerbGoSpotCheckIbottaSoulcycleVuclipJobviteBuild.comAdvancedHarness is set to be the standard for Continuous Delivery everywhereWe were able to achieve this feat of rapid customer acquisition and customer success due to the hard work and innovation from our product and engineering teams, who have delivered an astounding cadence of features and functionality. In near-record time, they created an enterprise-grade platform that’s designed for modern environments — microservices and public clouds — which integrates with almost every tool that DevOps teams are using.Our Continuous Verification built on machine learning has been a groundbreaking innovation. For engineering teams to know immediately that their deployment was successful was a previously unimagined capability. Being able to automate rollbacks in a matter of minutes is a brand-new playing field. (“A whole new world for us,” as our customer GoSpotCheck put it.)And to help break down the silos between engineering and security, we brought in secrets management and governance/compliance capabilities to ensure that security was baked into the deployment process at every step of the way.A culture built to lastAs much as technical ability, it’s the company culture that enables this kind of velocity, and I am very proud of the people and culture we have built at Harness. I firmly believe that the only long-term differentiation a company can build is its culture. Company culture defines how you take care of your customers — how you adjust to shifts in technology trends — how rapidly you can innovate — and how you find ways to execute even when the goals seem impossible.At Harness, I believe we have built the foundation for a great long-lasting culture. Every Harness employee brings tremendous passion, talent, hard work, and dedication to our mission every day, and I couldn't be more proud of each and every one of them.The journey aheadOur journey is just starting and there’s a lot more to come in the years ahead; we haven’t even played all our cards yet. Moving into this next phase of growth means we’ll be able to soon unveil new features and products that further solve the complexity around software delivery. We will be building even better ways to ensure the flawless delivery of software into the most difficult and challenging environments that engineering teams have ever faced.Every engineering team should be able to Ship without fear of failure. Every engineering team, when it comes to software delivery, should be unstoppable. And that’s what gets us excited to start each day — solving these hard problems, and making our customers (and employees) extraordinarily successful and productive along the way.