Harness Announces $60M Series B Financing from IVP, GV and ServiceNow

Harness, the industry's first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform, today announced it has closed a $60 million Series B funding round led by IVP, GV, and ServiceNow Ventures. Existing investors Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures also participated in the round. Harness will use this new round to expand investment in R&D and scale its rapidly growing engineering, sales, and customer success teams.

As every business becomes a software business, engineering teams are under unprecedented pressure to deliver software changes to users faster than ever, and with zero margin for error. The Harness mission is to make the practice of continuous delivery accessible to every business, empowering software teams to move fast and ship software without the fear of failed deployments. Harness uses advanced machine learning and AI to automate software deployments, analyze their quality, and automatically roll back if something goes wrong.

Harness was founded by Jyoti Bansal — former CEO and founder of AppDynamics, an application monitoring company acquired by Cisco for $3.7B in 2017 — and Rishi Singh, a former DevOps platform architect at Apple. Since launching from stealth in October 2017, Harness has experienced tremendous growth and helped dozens of customers such as McAfee, Home Depot, SoulCycle, Bank of Santander, NCR, and Beachbody significantly improve their ability to deliver software changes in modern cloud and container architectures. Customers typically see immediate gains with Harness: reduction in deployment times from many weeks to just a few hours, reduction of deployment-related errors by 95-99% percent, and a 3-4x increase in DevOps team efficiency.

"We were not actively seeking new investment at this point, but our strong market traction created heavy investor interest in Harness, resulting in a fast-moving and heavily oversubscribed Series B round," said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. "We are thrilled to partner with world-leading investment and technology firms — IVP, GV, and ServiceNow — as we continue to build Harness into the next major software platform company."

"Harness represents a tremendous opportunity to create the next multi-billion dollar company. The team has a powerful vision to redefine the software delivery process using automation and machine learning, and the company's market momentum is significantly beyond what we typically see in companies at this stage," said Steve Harrick, General Partner at IVP. "We were fortunate to be investors in Jyoti Bansal's previous company AppDynamics, and believe that Jyoti and the all-star team assembled at Harness have the ability to revolutionize software delivery within the enterprise."

Recent Company Accomplishments:

• Harness has won multiple industry awards during the last 12 months. It was recognized as a Gartner 2018 DevOps Cool Vendor, was among the 2018-2019 Cloud Award Winners, won the 2018 Barclays Innovation Challenge, and was recognized in the 2019 "Breakout List" as a "Hot Company to Work For."
• Harness recently announced that it has joined the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), a new foundation launched by the Linux Foundation in March 2019 to support collaboration around continuous delivery.
• Harness recently announced that it has teamed with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service to cloud-native applications and announced its availability for purchase on the AWS Marketplace.
• Harness recently announced that it has partnered with Google Cloud Platform to bring Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service to Kubernetes applications running in Google Cloud and announced its availability for purchase on GCP Marketplace.
• Harness appointed veteran sales leader from Twilio and Meraki/Cisco Jason Eubanks as Chief Revenue Officer to support its rapid growth.

Supporting Quotes

GV
"Harness delivers artificial intelligence to DevOps with thoughtful automation of key components of the software engineering workflow," said Adam Ghobarah, General Partner at GV. "With a mission driven by Jyoti Bansal and an incredibly strong founding team, Harness has the right team and technology in place to tackle some of the most complex challenges in software development and delivery."

ServiceNow Ventures
"With its Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform, Harness is working to solve complex and critical problems for software businesses," said Dominic Phillips, Vice President of ServiceNow Ventures. "ServiceNow Ventures is pleased to be a part of this current round of financing. As engineering and DevOps teams look to move with greater speed and agility, continuous delivery serves a critical role in the software development process."

Advanced - Harness customer
"Harness has helped Advanced and our hundreds of developers transform to a modern Continuous Delivery organization in a matter of months, while we had expected the process to take years," said Martin Reynolds, Head of DevOps at Advanced. "The ROI — where do I start? We've seen an 88% reduction in the average time it takes to deploy new code — from 2 days to 2 hours — a 90% reduction in the amount of time it takes to onboard new developers, and a 10x return on investment overall."

Ruckus Wireless - Harness customer
"Our legacy continuous delivery process didn't work in a modern microservices environment, and we selected Harness because it was a scalable, cloud-hosted platform designed with Kubernetes in mind," said Rajeshwari Zala, Director of Software Engineering at Ruckus Networks (Ruckus and Arris have now joined Commscope). "With Harness, we've given our developers the ability to perform their own software deployments without much oversight from DevOps — freeing Ruckus Networks from having to invest in a large build and release team."