Software delivery platform Harness bags $230M

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) company, Harness, has raised $230 million in a series D round of funding, valuing the company at a hefty $3.7 billion.

CI/CD is essentially a combination of “agile” practices that allow multiple developers to push out smaller changes to a shared code repository and test for product-readiness before manually shipping the code into production environments.

Used by companies such as eBay and Capital One, Harness offers “continuous-delivery-as-a-service,” which leans on machine learning and AI to automate many facets of the software delivery process, monitor quality, and enable rollbacks to swiftly reverse changes that cause problems. Harness was cofounded in 2016 by CEO Jyoti Bansal, who went on to sell his previous company AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion, and who more recently founded another company called Traceable.

With Harness, specifically, Bansal and company are betting on the growing push toward agile software development practices, and the simple fact that every company is becoming a software company. This means businesses of all sizes need to ship code faster than ever, increasing the need for tools to automate many of the steps involved, and ensure that bugs don’t inadvertently find their way into their live codebase.

“Companies want, and need, to innovate faster — to go from ideas to features in the hands of their users or customers, faster than their competition,” Bansal told VentureBeat. “Happy, productive software developers are the key to unlocking real innovation velocity.”

Year of growth

It has been a busy 15 months for Harness since its last round of financing. The San Francisco-based company has outwardly embraced open source, following its acquisition of open-source continuous integration company Drone.io.

Harness recently expanded into chaos engineering when it acquired ChaosNative; made its continuous delivery platform source available; and bolstered its broader platform with a suite of new features, including feature flags.

Moreover, Harness said that its annual revenue rate (ARR) has doubled over the past year, while its internal headcount has nearly tripled to 700. With another $230 million in the bank — which more than doubles its valuation from its series C round last January — Harness is well-resourced to continue its push into the software development sphere with more features and tools — but what this ultimately will be, remains to be seen.

“We’ve expanded our platform to include the entire, end-to-end developer experience — operations, quality, reliability, cost management, security, and governance — solving bigger problems for bigger customers, and helping them drive business outcomes through better software delivery,” Bansal said. “Our customers drive our roadmap, and we will continue to listen to them and invest in the platform.”

Harness’s series D round, which includes $175 million in equity and $55 million in debt, was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV; ServiceNow; Menlo Ventures; IVP; Capital One Ventures; Adage Capital Partners; Balyasny Asset Management; Gaingels; Harmonic Growth; Unusual Ventures, Citi Ventures; Battery Ventures; Alkeon Capital; Sorenson Capital; Thomvest Ventures; and Silicon Valley Bank.

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Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz