About Harness
Harness was founded in 2017 by Jyoti Bansal, a serial enterprise software entrepreneur who had previously founded and sold AppDynamics, an application performance monitoring company, to Cisco, based on his observation that software delivery, the broad process of building, testing, deploying, and operating software once it's written, remained fragmented across many separate specialized DevOps tools that different engineering teams within the same company often used inconsistently, creating both operational complexity and difficulty getting a unified view of software delivery performance and risk across an organization.
Harness's platform provides an integrated suite of software delivery tools, including continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities for automatically building, testing, and deploying code, feature flag management that lets engineering teams gradually roll out new features to a subset of users before a full release and quickly roll back problematic changes, cloud cost management tools that help engineering organizations understand and optimize their cloud infrastructure spending, and security scanning integrated into the software delivery pipeline, aiming to give engineering organizations a more unified, consistent software delivery experience across these historically separate tool categories rather than requiring teams to stitch together many different point solutions from different vendors. The company has grown substantially both through organic product development and an active acquisition strategy, purchasing a number of complementary software delivery and DevOps tool companies over time to expand its integrated platform's capabilities more quickly than building each capability from scratch would have allowed. Harness's customers span enterprise engineering organizations seeking to consolidate and modernize their software delivery toolchain, particularly larger organizations that have accumulated a patchwork of different DevOps tools across different teams over time and want more consistency and centralized visibility. The company has raised very substantial venture funding from investors including Sorenson Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and Adage Capital, reaching a valuation exceeding $3.7 billion, competing with other DevOps platforms including GitLab and various specialized point-solution vendors across the categories Harness's platform spans.
