The Relentless Entrepreneur: Jyoti Bansal’s Journey from Safari to Software Billions

Jyoti Bansal discovered retirement wasn’t for him in the most scenic way possible. At just 39 years old, he found himself on his second African safari, reflecting on his recent global adventures—hiking Machu Picchu, exploring Norwegian fjords, and trekking across the Himalayas. His bucket list was complete, but something fundamental was missing. “I tried to retire,” recalls Bansal, now 47, from his San Francisco home. “People say, ‘Once I retire, I’m going to do what I enjoy.’ I asked myself, ‘Do I enjoy playing golf all the time or being on the beach all the time?’ I don’t really. I realized why not just go back to what I enjoy, building a company.” This revelation led him back to entrepreneurship and the founding of Harness, an AI-based software delivery platform that recently secured a $240 million Series E round, valuing the company at $5.5 billion and pushing Bansal’s personal net worth to an estimated $2.3 billion.

Harness emerged from Bansal’s insights during his time at AppDynamics, his first successful venture. “The problem I was fascinated with at AppDynamics was when you ship software and a glitch happens or an outage happens, [our software] helps them fix it,” Bansal explains. “People don’t often realize writing code is just the first 30% of the job. Then you have the next 70% of the job to make sure you test that code properly.” This understanding became the foundation for Harness, which uses AI agents to automate the tedious and complex processes of securing, testing, and deploying code. Like a physical safety harness that protects workers, Bansal’s software shields companies from the risks of poorly tested code. The company serves major clients including United Airlines and Citi, helping them reduce the manual labor involved in software deployment. As Bansal puts it: “If you bring a trillion dollars of efficiency to the world, people will gladly pay you at least 10% of what you save them.” With the rise of generative AI dramatically increasing code production, Harness’s mission has become even more critical, as engineers struggle to thoroughly test the growing volume of automatically generated code.

Harness has expanded beyond its core continuous delivery business to encompass 16 related products, including Traceable, a cybersecurity company that Bansal founded separately before merging it with Harness. This strategic approach—what Steve Harrick of Institutional Venture Partners calls “a startup within a startup”—reflects Bansal’s methodical and ambitious business strategy. “When he came to pitch Harness [in 2017], he didn’t only pitch continuous [software] delivery, he laid out a roadmap for the next five to seven modules they were going to do,” Harrick explains. “It’s a very ambitious way to build a company. But in our first meeting, [Bansal] showed me a 10-year progression to a billion dollars in revenue. And he said, ‘That’s what we’re going to do.’…I’m really pleased to say that he’s on track.” This calculated approach to business expansion has been a hallmark of Bansal’s entrepreneurial style, allowing him to build comprehensive solutions rather than single-product companies.

Bansal’s entrepreneurial journey began far from Silicon Valley, in a small town in India’s Rajasthan state, where he helped with his father’s farming machinery business. His aptitude for technology earned him a spot at Delhi’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, where his entrepreneurial ambitions were sparked by a campus visit from Bill Gates and stories of successful IIT alumni like Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia. “That’s what brought me to Silicon Valley,” Bansal recounts. At 21, he arrived in California with minimal funds but maximum determination, beginning his American journey on an H1-B visa that prevented him from immediately starting his own business. “The challenge unfortunately is if you’re on an H1-B visa, you’re not allowed to start a company and create more jobs, which I find very ironic,” says Bansal, who became a U.S. citizen in 2016. “I had to wait for some time until I got a green card.” This experience shaped his views on immigration policy: “I do think our superpower in America is that we can attract the best talent from all over the world. Anything that removes that advantage to me is short-term thinking and is not good for us as a country.”

Once he secured his green card, Bansal founded AppDynamics in 2008, creating a sophisticated troubleshooting platform that helped companies like Netflix ensure their services ran smoothly. “Netflix was just starting their streaming business and moving everything online,” he recalls. “Imagine you’re a consumer on Netflix who gets frustrated because video is buffering. So some of our initial customers were companies like [Netflix], where we help their engineers to make sure no glitches happen or if glitches happen, they can fix them very fast.” Despite initial funding rejections, Bansal persevered, ultimately scaling AppDynamics to more than $200 million in revenue. The company was poised to go public in January 2017 when Cisco made an offer too good to refuse, acquiring AppDynamics for $3.7 billion just days before its planned IPO. The acquisition was transformative for both Bansal, who walked away with hundreds of millions, and for Cisco, where AppDynamics now reportedly generates over $1 billion in revenue.

After his brief retirement experiment, Bansal returned to entrepreneurship with a clear vision for Harness: to eliminate the “unnecessary work that no one wanted to do” in software development. “The whole world is running on code, whether banking or transactions or airlines or everything–and that code needs a safety harness,” he explains. “It frees up the developers to do interesting things and we can make sure everything is tested and deployed properly.” From its inception, Harness has leveraged AI to automate tasks, and with the recent advances in agentic AI, the platform has become even more powerful, capable of completing complex tasks that previously took weeks. With over 1,200 employees working in a hybrid model and 50% year-over-year growth, Harness has raised a total of $570 million to expand its market presence and accelerate innovation. For Bansal, who missed out on taking AppDynamics public, there’s a new addition to his bucket list: “We want to IPO,” he says. “We didn’t get to do it last time.” Given his track record of turning ambitious goals into reality, few would bet against him.