Harness Raises $240M to Automate AI ‘After‑Code’ Delivery, Valued at $5.5B

Harness, an AI‑first DevOps platform, raised $240 million in a Series E round that values the company at $5.5 billion. The round includes $200 million primary financing led by Goldman Sachs and a $40 million tender offer for employee liquidity, with participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures. Harness targets the ‘after‑code’ bottleneck—testing, security verification and deployment—that founder Jyoti Bansal says consumes roughly 70% of engineering effort as AI accelerates code generation. The company’s core IP is a software delivery knowledge graph that feeds AI agents to generate safe, policy‑aware pipelines and automated actions with human oversight and safety checks. Key metrics cited: 1,000+ enterprise customers, 128 million deployments, 1.2 trillion API calls protected, $1.9 billion in cloud spend optimized, and 1,200+ employees across 14 offices. Planned uses for proceeds include hiring hundreds of engineers (notably in Bengaluru), improving automated testing, deployment and security, and increasing AI accuracy. Goldman Sachs’ lead investment signals institutional confidence in AI‑driven DevOps. Founder Jyoti Bansal, who sold AppDynamics to Cisco in 2017, reiterated IPO ambitions when timing is right. For crypto and blockchain developers, Harness’s automation and deployment safety features are relevant because they address similar post‑development deployment complexities. This funding round underscores growing institutional interest in tools that automate secure, large‑scale software delivery in the AI era.