Harness Raises $60 Million to Disrupt, Boost Continuous Delivery Market

Continuous delivery startup Harness today closed a $60 million Series B funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners, Google Ventures, and ServiceNow Ventures. Existing vendors Big Labs, Menlo Ventures, and Unusual Ventures also participated. The startup is now valued at $500 million, according to Jyoti Bansal, Harness CEO and founder. Bansal said the Series B funding will support new research and development (R&D) efforts, grow its sales and customer support teams, and expand its footprint outside of the U.S. and into global markets like Europe and Asia. Bansal, who also founded application performance monitoring (APM) firm AppDynamics (which was later purchased by Cisco for $3.7 billion), launched Harness in October 2017 to help enterprises deliver new software and technology faster and without error. Its continuous delivery (CD) as-a-service platform does that by integrating with a layer of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to learn and understand an application’s environment. This enables the startup to initiate automatic rollbacks when errors are detected, avoid application downtime, and continuously and automatically verify application deployments and changes.