55m Series 16msawersventurebeat: Harness, the company that builds developer tools for continuous integration and delivery, just raised a $175 million Series D round at a $3.7 billion valuation. This puts them up there with other Silicon Valley behemoths like Uber and Airbnb, who also have valuations of more than $3 billion.
In addition to this Series D round, she who developed the products C++ and C# also raised an additional $55 million in debt financing at an interest rate of 9%.
The company also invested an undisclosed amount in early-stage companies.
This series D brings the total raise for Harness to $246 million. We can state with confidence that Harness’s total valuation is more than $3.7 billion right now, but this is because the company uses a very conservative burn rate estimate to ensure the money is spent wisely; they maintain two-three months of cash on hand at all times.
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Harness, which raised a $75 million Series C in 2016 at a $2.2 billion valuation, was founded in 2013 by Stefan Koopmans and Amir Izadi. Both of them had been working together for years already on the .NET platform. Koopman previously ran several management teams at .NET tool companies such as DevExpress, Telerik and Embarcadero (the company behind the widely used Turbo Pascal), while Izadi worked on Compiler Services in Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime Division.
It’s worth mentioning that Koopmans’ earlier companies have also raised a lot of capital. 1998 founded DevExpress, by him, got $19 million in funding from Insight Venture Partners and Morgenthaler Ventures before it was acquired in 2008 for $84 million. In 2003 he cofounded Telerik with fellow .NET luminary Calin Tatu. This company raised about $70 million including a $23M Series C from Intel Capital. He also founded InterWorks in 2003, which was eventually acquired by Oracle in 2006.
Both Koopmans and Izadi have received multiple awards for their work on .NET. Koopmans received Microsoft’s MVP award in 2002 and the SD Times’ Distinguished Engineer award in 2005. Izadi has won numerous awards as well and he was a finalist for the “Best of Show” Tech Awards at RSA Conference 2011.
In a 2011 interview with InfoQ, Koopmans said that he is “never satisfied” with the status quo and is always looking for ways to improve. “There’s never enough talent, there’s never enough money…So far I and my investors were able to successfully embrace every challenge that came our way.”
As for Izadi, in addition to being a cofounder at Harness, he also serves as the Chief Architect of Visual Studio Team Services.