San Francisco-based startup Harness, which first launched its continuous app delivery platform last year, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $60 million in its second round of funding.
The investment round was led by IVP, Google Ventures (GV) and ServiceNow Ventures. Existing investors Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures also participated in the round. Harness previously raised $20 million in its first funding round.
Harness will use the new funds to expand investment in its R&D, and beef up its growing engineering, sales and customer success teams.
Harness was founded by Jyoti Bansal and Rishi Singh, a former DevOps platform architect at Apple. Bansal was the former CEO and founder of AppDynamics, which is a cloud monitoring company that Cisco bought for $3.7 billion in 2017.
With the continued proliferation of cloud-native, Kubernetes and microservices, continuous delivery and continuous integration (CI/CD) have become key tools in helping organizations of all stripes quickly update, test and modify their software. Harness uses machine learning for its continuous-delivery-as-a-service approach, while also delivering artificial intelligence for DevOps in order to automate key components.
"We started Harness with a bold vision," Bansal said in a company blog today. "There are 20 million software developers in the world, and almost two trillion dollars each year are spent on software development. Even though every business has become a software business, almost everyone is struggling with software delivery. A software delivery process that’s continuous, reliable, secure, risk-free and drama-free simply didn’t exist. We started Harness with the mission to simplify software delivery for the twenty million software developers of the world by bringing industry’s first continuous-delivery-as-a-service platform to the market."
Harness' customer roster includes McAfee, Home Depot, SoulCycle, Bank of Santander and NCR. By using its platform, Harness customers can improve their ability to deliver software changes in cloud and container architectures in a shorter amount of time and in a more efficient manner.
Harness claims its platform can cut down on deployment-related errors by 95% to 99% while increasing DevOps team efficiency by a factor of three-times to four-times.
"Harness represents a tremendous opportunity to create the next multi-billion dollar company," said Steve Harrick, general partner at IVP, in a statement. "The team has a powerful vision to redefine the software delivery process using automation and machine learning, and the company's market momentum is significantly beyond what we typically see in companies at this stage. We were fortunate to be investors in Jyoti Bansal's previous company AppDynamics, and believe that Jyoti and the all-star team assembled at Harness have the ability to revolutionize software delivery within the enterprise."
RELATED: Linux Foundation bows Continuous Delivery Foundation for industry collaboration
Harness joined the Linux Foundation's recently announced Continuous Delivery Foundation in order to help collaborate with other companies in the industry around continuous delivery.
In March, Harness announced that it had teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service to cloud-native applications and announced its availability for purchase on the AWS Marketplace. Harness also partnered with Google Cloud Platform to bring its platform to Kubernetes applications running in Google Cloud and announced its availability on GCP Marketplace.
Harness was spun out of BIG Labs, which is a startup studio founded by Bansal, in 2017.
"We were not actively seeking new investment at this point, but our strong market traction created heavy investor interest in Harness, resulting in a fast-moving and heavily oversubscribed Series B round," said Bansal, in a prepared statement.