Harness reaches $1.7bn valuation with $115m in new PE financing

Harness, a platform for software delivery, has raised $115 million in financing, reaching a valuation of $1.7 billion in just three years after launching from stealth.

Alkeon Capital led a $85 million Series C round, along with new investors Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Sorenson Capital, and Thomvest Ventures. The total funding includes a $30 million Series B-1 funding round, led by existing investors Menlo Ventures, IVP, and Unusual Ventures.

With a total of $195 million in financing to date, Harness will use the funding to grow its world-class engineering team, support global expansion plans, and extend its intelligent software delivery platform vision.

In today’s digital economy, every company is a software company. The Covid-19 pandemic cemented this as it forced organisations around the globe to invest in new tools and digital capabilities to support millions of employees’ shift to remote work.

Demand for these tools will continue to increase: IDC projects that the DevOps market will reach $15 billion in 2023, up from $5.2 billion in 2018. For the world’s 25 million software developers, a platform that empowers them to deliver code quickly, reliably and efficiently is more valuable than ever. 

Since 2017, Harness’ vision has been to create such a software delivery platform: based on empowering developers with self-service and intelligent automation so they can simplify how they build, test, deploy, and optimise code. The company has emerged as a leader helping its customers weather technical and financial challenges brought on by the pandemic.

Last year, LogMeIn standardised self-service CI/CD pipelines across engineering teams with Harness Continuous Delivery, saving over a million dollars in engineering productivity. An eDiscovery software company, Relativity, also saved significant costs in annualised cloud spend using Harness’ cloud cost management module Continuous Efficiency. 

“Our goal is to create an intelligent software delivery platform that allows every company in the world to become as good in software delivery as the likes of Google and Facebook,” says Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. “Our investors believe strongly in our vision of an end-to-end platform for software delivery, and we look forward to partnering with these leading investment firms as we build Harness into the next major software company.”

Source: Private Equity Wire