Startup Harness Inc., which makes tools that help developers build applications more efficiently, has secured $ 230 million in new financing in a $ 3.7 billion value.
Harness announced the investment this morning, detailing that it included $ 175 million in equity funding and $ 55 million in debt financing. Norwest Venture Partners is the leading investor. More than a dozen other supporters also participated, including venture capital arms of Splunk Inc., ServiceNow Inc. and Google LLC.
In the past, companies would update applications every few months with new features and reliability enhancements. Right now, it’s common enterprise practice to release as many updates to the application per day. This skill is known as CI/CD, short for seamless integration and seamless delivery.
CI/CD implementation can be complicated because it often requires the use of multiple software development tools and writing large amounts of custom code. San Francisco -based Harness has developed a platform that promises to simplify the process. According to the startup, its platform provides pre-packaged CI/CD features that require less effort and custom code to implement than competing offers.
“Many of these complex CI/CD pipelines that people need, they can take three months, six months, to put it together,” Harness co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jyoti Bansal (pictured ) explained in an interview with SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE last year. “In Harness an hour [to] put together a very, very sophisticated CI/CD pipeline. “
Prior to launching Harness, Bansal founded AppDynamics Inc., a developer tool provider obtained of Cisco Systems Inc. in 2017 for $ 3.7 billion. AppDynamics, Bansal explained, spends millions of dollars a year on custom code to manage the deployment of software changes.
The Harness platform has been adopted by eBay Inc., Capital One Financial Corp. and other major brands to help them manage software updates more efficiently. Capital One participated in the announced increase in startup investment through its venture capital arm. Harness said strong customer demand has helped more than double its annual recurring revenue in the past year, but it did not share full numbers.
In addition to implementing CI/CD to increase the frequency with which application updates can be released, Harness also assists its customers with various software related tasks.
One particularly complex task that the startup promises to alleviate is the reversing of application updates that contain errors. On the Harness platform, a company can implement a strategy called canary deployment that reduces the impact of incorrect software changes.
Using the canary deployment method, software developers install updates on a limited subset of servers that run an application. Testing new code on a limited number of servers makes it possible to determine if the code contains issues. If no issues are found, the update will be released on all servers where an application is running.
The Harness platform uses machine learning to detect false updates and can restore them automatically. It also detects issues in the way an application recovers from technical issues. Many enterprise applications are expected to continue to work reliably after technical issues, a requirement that Harness helps developers address by enabling them to test how a workload responds to different types of losses.
In the past year, using a $ 85 million round of funding announced last January, Harness continues to expand its focus into additional market segments. The startup platform can now not only accelerate the release of software updates, but also help companies reduce their cloud infrastructure costs. In addition, it offers features for finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities in application code.
The code security and cloud cost optimization segments are both key markets. In the former area, for example, a major market player was reported planning to go public to an $ 8.6 billion value.
Harness’s recent moves into new product categories could unlock additional revenue opportunities for the startup, and thus expand its addressable market. The prospect of additional growth opportunities in the future may be one of the reasons why Harness achieved a valuation of $ 3.7 billion following its newly closed $ 230 million investment. The valuation valued the startup more than twice as much as in the previous round of funding in January.
Harness said it will use the investment to continue improving its platform, as well as hiring more workers. The startup’s headcount has nearly tripled since January 2021 to more than 700 workers.
Photo: SiliconANGLE
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