Today, Norwest is thrilled to announce our Series C investment in Harness. Harness is the leading intelligent continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) and software delivery platform that empowers software engineering teams to develop applications more quickly and securely. We’re excited to partner with co-founders Jyoti Bansal (CEO) and Rishi Singh (CTO) on their journey to help enterprises get ship done.

Visionary Team

Jyoti Bansal is a true innovator and world-class CEO. Jyoti previously served as Founder and CEO of AppDynamics, the leading APM company that was acquired by Cisco for $3.7B in 2017. Jyoti met his co-founder and CTO, Rishi Singh, while they were both students at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. Rishi previously led the Deployment Automation (CD) platform team at Apple and has deep domain expertise in software delivery. It is rare to meet founders with the clarity of thought, vision, and enterprise track record that Jyoti and Rishi have, so we jumped on the opportunity to partner with them on Harness. Together, they have attracted an all-star team that has helped scale large enterprise companies such as Zoom, Twilio, AppDynamics, Meraki, and SAP.

Massive Market Opportunity

The pace of software development has increased exponentially over the past two decades. Enterprises have shifted away from monolith code bases to microservices architectures, so instead of shipping a build 1-2x a year, they are now shipping updates to different microservices multiple times a day. While this allows companies to innovate faster, it also results in more bugs that could cause severe production issues without an automated CI/CD platform that tests and validates these changes. CI/CD has thus emerged as a DevOps best practice as companies digitally transform and engineering teams adopt agile development.

Prior to Harness, engineering teams were forced to manually script homegrown CI/CD platforms using open-source tools to enable robust testing, code releases, and rollbacks for any failures. These brittle in-house solutions require dedicated engineers to build and manage them, making them expensive to maintain over time. Harness has helped customers cut down the time it takes to build CI/CD platforms by as much as 1.5 years and reduce engineering toil while increasing developer productivity and deployment velocity.

Clear Long-Term Vision & Strong Customer Love

At the core of every product decision at Harness is the goal of making developers’ lives easier. This has led Harness to take a best-of-suite approach to streamlining the software delivery lifecycle, starting with CD, then CI, and now Continuous Efficiency (cloud cost optimization), with much more to come in the next few years. We heard overwhelmingly positive feedback from many customers who were happy that Harness was able to meet their needs no matter where they were in their digital transformation journey.

We are excited to welcome Jyoti, Rishi, and the Harness team to the Norwest family!