Harness Acquires Drone.io: Enterprise CI Revolutionized

Harness completed its initial acquisition in August, incorporating the continuous integration startup Drone.io into its portfolio. Following this move, the company promptly leveraged this purchase by unveiling a new continuous integration solution for enterprise-level applications, complementing the open-source project already developed by Drone.

The Harness software development platform is comprised of several distinct modules, with this latest addition focused on continuous integration – the crucial phase of building and testing code prior to its deployment by developers.

As Brad Rydzewski, a co-founder of Drone.io, articulated during the acquisition process:

At the time of the acquisition, Bansal expressed his intention to expand upon the existing open-source project by introducing a commercially available enterprise version, while simultaneously maintaining support for the open-source community.

“This represents the industry’s inaugural product to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning for the purpose of optimizing the build and test cycles,” stated Bansal. This intelligent functionality distinguishes it from the open-source iteration of the software, with the core concept being the utilization of machine learning to accelerate both building and testing procedures.

Alongside this, the company is also introducing a new module dedicated to feature flag management. These flags are incorporated by developers into code to control the release of software updates, enabling them to monitor performance before a full rollout to all users. However, as the number of these flags increases, managing them effectively becomes challenging, and this new module aims to provide developers with the tools to understand and govern the flags within their codebase.

Bansal has stated that his vision for the company is to make sophisticated, automated software delivery pipelines accessible to all developers.

“[Our objective] is to empower every organization globally to achieve a software delivery capability comparable to that of industry leaders like Google, Amazon, or Facebook,” Bansal explained.

Bansal previously established AppDynamics, which was acquired by Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion. He subsequently founded Harness in the latter part of that same year. According to PitchBook data, the company has secured approximately $80 million in funding, with a valuation of $500 million.

In 2018, Bansal also initiated the venture capital firm Unusual Ventures. Furthermore, he launched Traceable, a security-focused startup, in July, adding to his already extensive portfolio of ventures.