In August, Harness made its first acquisition when it bought the open source continuous integration startup Drone.io. The company wasted no time building on that purchase, announcing today a new business continuous integration tool to complement the open source project that Drone is building.
The Harness software development platform is made up of various modules and the last one helps with continuous integration, which is the process of compiling and testing that takes place before developers start rolling out code changes.
As Brad Rydzewski, co-founder of Drone.io, explained it at the time of the acquisition:
"Drone is continuous integration software. Help developers continually build, test, and deploy their code. The project was launched in 2012 and was the first cloud-native and container-native continuous integration solution on the market and we made it open source. "
Bansal indicated at the time of the acquisition that he wanted to build on that open source project and provide an enterprise commercial version, while continuing to support the open source project.
"This is truly the first product in the industry that is bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning into streamlining the build and test process," said Bansal. This level of intelligence is what separates it from the open source version of the software, and the idea is to use machine learning to speed up the building and testing process.
The company also announces a new module for managing feature markings. These are elements that developers leave in code to limit software roll out, allowing them to see how the update is performing before rolling it out to the user base at large. The problem is these as these flags proliferate, they become difficult to manage and the new module is designed to help developers understand and control the flags that exist in their code.
Bansal says his goal for the company has been to put the kind of automated software delivery pipeline that exists in the world's largest technology companies within the reach of every developer.
"[Our goal] is that every company in the world can have the same level of sophistication in software delivery as Google, Amazon or Facebook, "said Bansal.
Bansal founded AppDynamics, a company that sold to Cisco in 2017 for $ 3.7 billion. He launched Harness later that same year. The company raised nearly $ 80 million on a $ 500 million valuation, according to data from Pitchbook.
Bansal also started venture capital firm Unusual Ventures in 2018 and, as if he didn't have enough to do, launched his third startup Traceable, a security firm, in July.
