Technology entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal’s software delivery startup Harness plans to increase its investment in India. The company will utilise a substantial portion of the USD 150 million financing raised in May from Silicon Valley Bank and Hercules Capital to support its research and development (R&D) efforts.
“A big part of our capital is to continue building out our platform in a bigger way,” Jyoti Bansal, co-founder and CEO at Harness told BW Businessworld in an exclusive interview.
“Our platform is designed to provide everything software engineers need to deliver software. We started with one module, and now we have 12, with plans to grow even further. We are fundamentally an R&D-driven organisation and will continue to invest in developing good products,” he added.
The California-based company reported an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of USD 100 million last year, with Bansal noting that the current figure is well above that.
“Harness is almost as big as AppDynamics when we sold the company. The business is growing very well, with a big focus on India from the very beginning. Approximately 50 to 60 per cent of our R&D is done in India, primarily in the Bangalore office, but we also have remote employees in Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, and other locations”- Jyoti Bansal, co-founder and CEO at Harness
The company plans to triple its workforce in India, currently around 250, over the next five years.
Bansal stressed the company’s long-term mission to enhance software development efficiency. “With Harness, we started with the mission to support the 30 million software developers worldwide, who drive innovation in every industry. There are 30-50 per cent inefficiencies in current software engineering processes. We aim to build the next generation of toolchains, incorporating AI and automation to help software engineers work more efficiently.”
Harness aims to achieve USD 1 billion in ARR as it continues to develop its next-generation platform for software development and DevOps.
Bansal famously sold AppDynamics to Cisco for USD 3.7 billion in 2017. Subsequently, he founded Harness in 2017 and cybersecurity startup Traceable in 2020 and co-founded the venture capital firm Unusual Ventures in 2018.