The round was led by Menlo Ventures and BIG Labs. Jyoti Bansal, the founder and former CEO of AppDynamics, heads the company as CEO and co-founder just nine months after selling AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion. Bansal is joined by Rishi Singh, former DevOps platform architect at Apple, as CTO and co-founder. Harness is the first company spun out of BIG Labs, Bansal's newly launched startup studio.

Businesses are under unprecedented pressure to deliver new software and technology to users faster than ever, and with zero margin for error. Yet current approaches to software delivery remain complicated, highly manual, and risk-prone. Continuous delivery -- a new software engineering practice that allows development teams to deliver their changes to end-users in hours instead of months -- has only been successfully implemented by a handful of companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. A recent Forrester survey found 64 percent of businesses are dissatisfied with the time it takes to release new features to customer-facing business services or applications.

Harness' mission is to make the practice of continuous delivery accessible to every business, empowering engineering teams to move fast and ship code without the fear of failed deployments. By applying unsupervised machine learning to the continuous delivery process, the platform understands an application's baseline environment and can initiate automatic rollbacks when irregular activity is detected, avoiding application downtime or widespread failures. To date, Harness has reduced deployment time from many weeks to a few hours, and has reduced errors by nearly 99 percent.

"The machine learning aspect of Harness give us the peace of mind and confidence to conduct multiple deployments on any given day," said Ed Rose, director of software development at Build.com. "In a pre-Harness world we would spend maybe an hour with several of our senior engineers monitoring activity post-release. We can now reduce that to one individual who oversees Harness as needed, freeing up our engineering talent."

"Harness helped in reducing our deployment times tenfold. The continuous deployment platform connects our monitoring and logging, while giving us the option to do canary deployments and blue/green deployments with automatic rollbacks. It would take weeks, months, even years to develop those features in-house," said John Stuart, VP of DevOps, IT and Security at Jobvite.

"At AppDynamics, our customers were happily using our platform to monitor their complex software applications, but almost all of them told me that the process for delivering rapid changes to those applications remained a huge problem," said Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal. "Software engineering teams need a platform that's intuitive and powered by modern AI to meet demand for incredibly fast, high-quality releases. Rishi and I are excited to launch Harness and address a massive problem challenging software engineering teams everywhere."

"Nobody knows how to make engineering teams' lives easier than Jyoti Bansal, and I'm proud to extend our relationship," said Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures who will sit on the Harness board. "We worked together successfully at AppDynamics, and I believe he's found an even bigger market opportunity with Harness. After all, every company on the planet is now in the business of developing software, which means every company on the planet needs a way to deliver software into production simply, safely, and securely. Jyoti has the vision, leadership and experience to create yet another world-class organization."

Key product features include:

Pipeline Builder - allows teams to build and execute complete CD pipelines with serial or parallel workflows across their applications, services and environments.

Workflow Wizards - enables teams to rapidly build deployment workflows with out-of-the-box support for canary deployments, blue/green deployments using cloud technologies such as AWS EC2, AWS Lambda, Docker and Kubernetes.

Continuous Verification - applies unsupervised machine learning to automatically verify application deployments, detecting performance and quality regressions from tools such as AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk, Elastic and Sumo Logic.

Smart Rollbacks - automates rollback to the last working artifact version and run-time configuration with no required scripting or code.

Continuous Security - offers full role-based access control capabilities with the ability to manage secrets, compliance rules and audit trails across deployments.

About Harness:
Based in San Francisco, Harness is the industry's first Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service platform designed to provide a simple, safe and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses machine learning to detect the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight. Harness was started and launched by Jyoti Bansal's BIG Labs, and is backed by top-tier venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. Follow us on Twitter and request a trial at www.harness.io.

About BIG Labs:
Based in San Francisco, BIG (Bansal Innovation Group) Labs is Jyoti Bansal's startup studio focused on solving the most challenging technology problems with unique applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. After founding and selling AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion, Bansal founded BIG Labs to give the next billion dollar ideas a place to reach their potential. Learn more at www.biglabs.com.