Jyoti Bansal has a good track record when it comes to launching startups. He sold his first company, AppDynamics, for $ 3.7 billion the week it was supposed to go public in 2017. His latest company, Harness, announced a $ 230 million Series D today for … wait for it .. . $ 3.7 billion.
The fact that the numbers are the same is not lost on Bansal, and in fact the Cisco deal closed at the end of March in 2017, almost exactly five years ago. But Bansal sees a big difference between the two companies.
“Yes, the price is the same, but I would say when we sold AppDynamics it was like the end of the road. It was like the beginning of the road. We are just getting started. That’s the difference, ”Bansal said.
He sees the category of developer tools in which Harness works as one that presents a greater opportunity with a potential market of 30 million developers worldwide. He pointed out that developer talent is expensive and hard to find, and his company’s goal is to make these employees better.
“We want to build tools for developers to be better. They often do mundane tasks, which takes up 50% of their time … They do too many things manually that they don’t need, and that’s where we simplify most of these things, and use AI to help with some of that, ”he said.
That platform has expanded over the years and includes CI/CD tooling, cloud pricing optimization, feature flags and chaos engineering. In some cases, Bansal chose to build, in others to buy, such as when the company bought ChaosNative last month, or Drone.io in 2020.
He has been raising money for a long time, and despite his pedigree and the company’s success up to this point, he said fundraising in the current climate is certainly more difficult. “It’s the hardest fundraising market in a long time, but we still have a lot of interest from investors,” he said. It started with a knock on his door, and when fixed the others joined, and there were a large number of participants in this round.
While the number of employees is close to 700, up from 250 at the time of its Series C at the beginning of last year, with this capital, Bansal plans to put more resources into R&D to develop additional modules. on the platform, while expanding the company’s reach around the world. As an experienced startup founder, Bansal provided a lot of thought about how to build a diverse and inclusive company.
He said it starts with developing the right culture where everyone feels accepted. “You have to have a positive culture, and you hear all the stories of tech companies and startups with a ‘bro culture’. For me, the first thing is the culture has to be right. We can’t have that culture with any group feeling that this is not the right place for them or not welcome, ”he said.
He said the second part is actively trying to be diverse. “You have to work out a way to hire and recruit employees from diverse backgrounds. Otherwise, it’s not happening alone. So we’re very much focused there on our recruiting teams, and they have goals. and targets designed to increase our diversity, and then we track it, ”he said.
The investment is now led by Norwest Venture Partners along with new investors JP Morgan, Capital One Ventures, Splunk Ventures, Adage Capital Partners, Balyasny Asset Management, Gaingels, Harmonic Growth Partners. Also participating were current investors including ServiceNow, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Unusual Ventures, Citi Ventures, Battery Ventures, Alkeon Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Sorenson Capital, Thomvest Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.
The round breaks down to $ 175 million in equity and $ 55 million in debt financing. The company’s value has risen $ 2 billion since the $ 85 million Series C round last year when it was valued at $ 1.7 billion. The company has now raised $ 370 million, according to Crunchbase data.