Construction worker wearing safety harness and safety line working high place at industrial.

Harness acquires Armory

by with No Comment Tech

Construction worker wearing safety harness and safety line working high place at industrial.

Image Credits: Natnan Srisuwan / Getty Images

Software delivery platform Harness today announced that it has acquired the assets of Armory, a continuous deployment startup built on top of the open source Spinnaker project. As Harness CEO and founder Jyoti Bansal told me, the acquisition price was about $7 million in cash. In total, Armory had raised more than $82 million, including a $40 million Series C round led by B Capital in late 2020. Other investors include Lead Edge Capital, Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Mango Capital, Y Combinator and Javelin Venture Partners.

Harness will hire many of Armory’s employees and Harness will continue to support existing Armory implementations. But Bansal also stressed that this is very much an asset deal. He does, of course, hope that many of Armory’s customers will migrate to the Harness platform over time, but he also stressed that he wants to help Armory’s existing customer base. “Our purpose mostly is to provide the kind of continuity of relationships and continuity of service to the customers. Over time, if we do the right things by customers, they can become even bigger Harness platform customers and Harness has a lot of offerings in our platform to help these accounts,” Bansal said.

Jim Douglas, ex-CEO of Wind River, took over from co-founder Daniel R. Odio as Armory’s CEO in 2021. Some of Armory’s current customers include LaunchDarkly, Autodesk, Informatica, Patreon, First Republic Bank and HelloSign.

Image Credits: Harness

This acquisition also follows the wider trends that have been playing out in the overall enterprise software ecosystem, where the current economic climate favors end-to-end solutions over single-point solutions as businesses look to consolidate and reduce their expenses. “The market is growing for DevOps solutions, but for single-point solutions, it’s hard to compete,” Bansal said. “The economic environment has been definitely challenging for a lot of startups to continue to raise capital. It’s good and bad. It’s good for companies like Harness, but at the same time I feel, from a startup ecosystem, yes, there are challenges right now and companies have to be operating at a much higher standard, than previously.”

Harness may implement some of Armory’s technology into its own products and Bansal stressed that he hopes that the experienced Armory engineers Harness plans to hire will also help it continue to innovate (and support the existing Armory customer base).

Talking about Harness in general, Bansal noted that he wants to build an enduring company that will, one day, go public. The last time he tried that, Cisco acquired his company AppDynamics for $3.7 billion right before it was scheduled to IPO.

If you know more about this acquisition, you can contact Frederic on Signal at (860) 208-3416 or by email ([email protected]).

Armory nabs $40M Series C as commercial biz on top of open-source Spinnaker project takes off

Construction worker wearing safety harness and safety line working high place at industrial.

Harness acquires Armory

by with No Comment Tech

Construction worker wearing safety harness and safety line working high place at industrial.

Image Credits: Natnan Srisuwan / Getty Images

Software delivery platform Harness today announced that it has acquired the assets of Armory, a continuous deployment startup built on top of the open source Spinnaker project. As Harness CEO and founder Jyoti Bansal told me, the acquisition price was about $7 million in cash. In total, Armory had raised more than $82 million, including a $40 million Series C round led by B Capital in late 2020. Other investors include Lead Edge Capital, Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Mango Capital, Y Combinator and Javelin Venture Partners.

Harness will hire many of Armory’s employees and Harness will continue to support existing Armory implementations. But Bansal also stressed that this is very much an asset deal. He does, of course, hope that many of Armory’s customers will migrate to the Harness platform over time, but he also stressed that he wants to help Armory’s existing customer base. “Our purpose mostly is to provide the kind of continuity of relationships and continuity of service to the customers. Over time, if we do the right things by customers, they can become even bigger Harness platform customers and Harness has a lot of offerings in our platform to help these accounts,” Bansal said.

Jim Douglas, ex-CEO of Wind River, took over from co-founder Daniel R. Odio as Armory’s CEO in 2021. Some of Armory’s current customers include LaunchDarkly, Autodesk, Informatica, Patreon, First Republic Bank and HelloSign.

Image Credits: Harness

This acquisition also follows the wider trends that have been playing out in the overall enterprise software ecosystem, where the current economic climate favors end-to-end solutions over single-point solutions as businesses look to consolidate and reduce their expenses. “The market is growing for DevOps solutions, but for single-point solutions, it’s hard to compete,” Bansal said. “The economic environment has been definitely challenging for a lot of startups to continue to raise capital. It’s good and bad. It’s good for companies like Harness, but at the same time I feel, from a startup ecosystem, yes, there are challenges right now and companies have to be operating at a much higher standard, than previously.”

Harness may implement some of Armory’s technology into its own products and Bansal stressed that he hopes that the experienced Armory engineers Harness plans to hire will also help it continue to innovate (and support the existing Armory customer base).

Talking about Harness in general, Bansal noted that he wants to build an enduring company that will, one day, go public. The last time he tried that, Cisco acquired his company AppDynamics for $3.7 billion right before it was scheduled to IPO.

If you know more about this acquisition, you can contact Frederic on Signal at (860) 208-3416 or by email ([email protected]).

Armory nabs $40M Series C as commercial biz on top of open-source Spinnaker project takes off

After surpassing $100M in ARR, Harness grabs a $150M line of credit

by with No Comment Tech

Young woman programming.

Image Credits: Yana Iskayeva / Getty Images

Harness isn’t founder Jyoti Bansal’s first startup. He sold AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017, the week it was supposed to go public. His latest venture has raised $425 million, per Crunchbase.

On Tuesday, Harness announced $150 million in debt financing, essentially a line of credit that the company can draw on as needed. It could be the final private financial step before an eventual IPO. It’s worth noting that the company took another round of debt financing of $55 million in 2022. 

Harness has built a soup-to-nuts toolset for software development teams that includes a CI/CD pipeline, code repository, developer portal and infrastructure as code support, among other things. The company hinted that it will use the financing to build or buy other pieces for the toolset.

Bansal says they were looking at different ways to raise money, and he saw debt financing as a way healthy public companies access additional capital. “We’ve been looking at what is the best way to raise capital, and if you look at a public company, most of the public companies have access to debt — and that’s what they would be raising as a very healthy business,” Bansal told TechCrunch.

He also says it’s an efficient way to raise capital because they don’t have to give up any equity; this could be a good final raise before the next logical step. “We think we can take this loan all the way to an IPO. We don’t need to raise any more equity. Who knows, we may end up doing it, but we don’t need to, and we can go from here to an IPO without additional investment,” he said.

The business appears to be well set up for that next big step: It surpassed $100 million in ARR last year, a signal that the company is sustainable and around for the long term. Bansal says that the revenue has continued to accelerate beyond that milestone.

The company recently hired a chief revenue officer, and it has a chief financial officer in place — all signs that the company is thinking ahead to an IPO.

Bansal has set three criteria for being successful: Harness wants substantial revenue, accelerating far beyond the $100 million it hit last year; it wants to be efficient because Wall Street is demanding it now; and it wants to be high growth. If Bansal continues to steer the business with those three goals, he thinks that will eventually lead to going public.

“An IPO is just a milestone of operating as a company. It’s not as though the IPO is an exit. It’s the first step in becoming a public company,” he said. “So whenever the gates are open, and we are ready, we just want to be in the right financial position, that our business is strong, and that it has all the right elements to it.”

And for Bansal, who sold his previous startup just before going public, being the head of a public company is something he aspires to. “That’s the next challenge, which I’m excited about,” he said.

The $150 million debt line comes from Silicon Valley Bank and Hercules Capital, Inc.