Software delivery platform Harness has secured a Series E funding round of $240 million. The company is now valued at $5.5 billion. The round was dominated by an investment from Goldman Sachs, which contributed $200 million.
The American company Harness focuses on what it calls the “outer loop”: the phase after writing code. AI is already coding away, with varying degrees of success, but Harness argues that the role of technology should not stop there. After all, coding only accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the software engineering cycle, according to Harness. Testing, deployment, security checks, compliance, and optimization quickly fill up the rest of this percentage. The company hopes to use AI to reduce manual work in these areas as well.
The company warns that this move is also becoming more urgent due to AI. The amount of code could increase by a factor of four due to AI (which we consider to be a conservative estimate), widening the gap between rapid development and reliable software delivery. “The next frontier for AI in software engineering is applying intelligence to the delivery process — testing, verification, deployments, governance, and everything that happens after code is written,” said Jyoti Bansal, cofounder and CEO of Harness. “Our customers are moving faster than ever with AI, but the delivery process is where complexity and risk pile up. Harness is leading the way in bringing clarity, automation, and control to this part of the lifecycle so teams can ship software quickly, safely, and reliably at scale.”
Three-layer platform architecture
Harness wants to use the capital to further develop “Harness AI.” According to the company, this system is specifically built for the post-coding phase. The platform operates on three fundamental layers: AI Agents that perform specific tasks such as delivery and security, a Software Delivery Knowledge Graph that maps code changes and environments, and an enterprise-grade Orchestration engine that automates workflows.
Harness’ platform approach allows organizations to build internal developer platforms with self-service toolchains. By leveraging organizational context, Harness says the platform can identify and resolve issues before they reach production. This means that every organization gets a tailor-made solution without requiring actual customization from consultants or implementation teams, for example.
Strong growth in a competitive market
Harness reports that the company is on track to exceed $250 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 2025. That would represent growth of more than 50 percent on an annual basis. The market for AI-driven DevOps and CI/CD is growing rapidly, with approximately 60 percent of companies already using AI-driven automation in DevOps workflows. In short, this growth can result from both a larger market share and riding the wave of an emerging market.
In the past twelve months, Harness processed 128 million deployments and 81 million builds through its platform. In addition, 1.2 trillion API calls were protected and, according to the company, the platform achieved $1.9 billion in cloud spend optimization. More than 1,000 customers are already on board, mostly larger organizations. Harness’s own workforce has already grown to 1,200 employees spread across 14 global offices. The Series E funding is intended to “accelerate platform innovation” and expand its global reach.
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