Harness

Harness operates a software delivery platform that automates the stages of the software development lifecycle that follow code authoring. Its modules span continuous delivery and GitOps, continuous integration, an internal developer portal built on Backstage, infrastructure-as-code management, database DevOps and an artifact registry. A testing and reliability group covers AI test automation with self-healing tests, resilience/chaos testing with more than 225 pre-built experiments, feature management and experimentation via feature flags, and AI-assisted incident triage (AI SRE). Security modules include application security testing, web application and API protection, and discovery and protection of AI assets. A cost group provides cloud and AI cost management plus engineering-effectiveness analytics using DORA and SPACE frameworks. The platform advertises more than 100 integrations and can be adopted whole or module by module.

Third-party description characterizes Harness as a platform combining CI and CD with cloud-native deployment automation, progressive deployment strategies such as canary and blue/green, real-time deployment analytics, service reliability management tracking SLIs, chaos engineering, IaC integration, security testing orchestration including SAST and software composition analysis, and GitOps workflows tied to version control for auditability. Harness also maintains Harness Open Source, an open source developer platform on GitHub with source code management, CI/CD pipelines, hosted developer environments (Gitspaces) and artifact registries; the project is positioned as the next generation of Drone, with Drone preserved as a feature branch.

The company states 1,200+ employees, 1,000+ customers and $570M in funding, and reported being on track to exceed $250M ARR in 2025 with growth above 50%.

Founding story

Jyoti Bansal co-founded Harness in October 2017 after selling AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion, motivated by his view that the principal engineering bottleneck lies not in writing code but in the testing, verification, security, deployment and governance steps that follow. Harness was developed within BIG Labs (Bansal Innovation Group), the startup studio Bansal launched in October 2017, and was its first company.

Business model

Harness sells access to its software delivery platform on a subscription basis, with customers able to deploy the full platform or individual modules alongside existing tooling.

Harness offers three subscription tiers: an Open Source plan at no cost including code repository, continuous integration, continuous delivery, cloud development environments and artifact registry; a Free plan at $0 adding feature management and experimentation, infrastructure as code management, cloud cost management, chaos engineering and 2,000 monthly cloud credits; and an Enterprise plan without public pricing that adds service reliability management, software engineering insights and internal developer portals. A third-party source cites Vendr.com estimating annual Enterprise cost of $23K–$41K for a 200-employee organization.

Traction

Harness reports more than 1,000 customers, 1,200+ employees, over 100 integrations and being on track to exceed $250 million in ARR in 2025 with growth of more than 50%. Its open source repository has roughly 38,100 GitHub stars and 3,400 forks. Customer-reported outcomes include United Airlines accelerating deployment times by 75% and migrating 80% of workloads to cloud, Morningstar achieving 5x faster builds and consolidating 36,000 pipelines to 50 templates, Keller Williams increasing deployment frequency 6x, National Australia Bank reducing build failures by 67%, Citibank cutting deployment times to 7 minutes across 20,000 engineers, and Ancestry reporting an 80-to-1 reduction in developer effort.

Latest developments

In December 2025 Harness announced a $240 million Series E financing valuing the company at $5.5 billion, consisting of a $200 million investment led by Goldman Sachs and a planned $40 million tender offer with participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures. Alongside the raise the company described expanding its platform into agentic AI workflows grounded in its knowledge graph and orchestration engine. Bill Koefoed, previously CFO of OneStream, became Harness CFO in April 2026. Platform updates in 2026 included native AWS CDK support in infrastructure as code, the introduction of SAST and software composition analysis, OPA-based GitOps governance, expanded chaos fault libraries for Linux and Windows, disaster recovery management entities and APIs, and authentication and permission hardening.