Software company Harness is valued at $5.5 billion after its latest funding round.
The company’s Series E, announced Thursday (December 11) was led by Goldman Sachs and brought in $200 million.
“AI has rewritten the first half of software engineering” Jyoti Bansalco-founder and CEO of Harness, wrote on the company blog.
“The second half – everything after code – will define the next chapter. Delivering software securely, reliably and with confidence will undoubtedly be the biggest differentiator for modern engineering teams.”
He added that the “investment accelerates our ability to build the systems that make that possible: unified intelligence, deep context and automation that brings clarity to complexity.”
A press release about the funding round discusses the basis behind Harness’ work, noting that while artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way software is written, this work is just the beginning of the technical lifecycle.
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Most teams spend only 30 to 40% of their time “writing and iterating” code, the company added, with the majority of their workdays focused on things like testing, deployments, security, compliance and optimization.
“These workflows are tightly coupled and remain highly manual, creating friction that slows speed,” the release said. “Harness brings AI and automation to this outer loop, transforming the most complex and time-consuming parts of software delivery into intelligent, streamlined processes.”
A report CNBC’s on the round notes that this investment comes amid a wave of venture capital for startups selling subscriptions for tools that allow AI models to write and update software.
That report added that Harness recently expanded its cybersecurity offering by merging with Traceableanother startup co-founded by Bansal.
In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote about findings from the recent report on Thursday “Prompt Economy™: When Bots Are the Customer,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa. It shows agentic AI tools such as Rufus from Amazon, Sparky from Walmart, Google’s AI-enabled Chrome, and Windows‘ Model Context Protocol has become a new class of ‘customers’ within the retail world.
Shoppers in the 21st century, PYMNTS wrote, are increasingly starting their journey with a prompt instead of a search bar, giving AI assistants instructions such as “find a black organic cotton T-shirt under $40 or a gift that ships Friday,” to name one example.
“AI customers don’t care about pretty homepages or cinematic campaigns. They can’t be dazzled by product photography,” the report said.
“They are assessing brands through an entirely different lens: structured data quality, machine-readable policies, endpoint reliability, and execution performance. This shift is creating a dual-consumer reality unlike anything retailers have ever experienced.”
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