Exclusive-AI software startup Harness valued at $5.5 billion in latest financing round
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FILE PHOTO: U.S. dollar banknotes are displayed in this illustration taken, February 14, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Dec 11 (Reuters) - Harness, an AI software development startup, has raised $200 million in a Goldman Sachs-led fundraising round that values it at $5.5 billion, the company said on Thursday.
The financing marks a 49% jump in the firm's valuation nearly four years after a Series-D round valued it at $3.7 billion.
Private market investors continue to plough into artificial intelligence as the nascent technology promises to universally automate structured and repetitive corporate and tech tasks.
Harness is also planning a $40 million tender offer with participation from existing investors IVP, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures.
"We were not looking to actively raise capital right now," Harness Cofounder and CEO Jyoti Bansal told Reuters in an interview.
"But we had a lot of investor interest. So a lot of people were coming and reaching out to us, and that's what kind of created this financing," he said.
As boardrooms look to use AI to aid, and sometimes to replace, expensive software engineers, the velocity and volume of code being written has dramatically accelerated.
Harness has been benefiting from this shift, as it offers workflow AI tools that develop written code into practical use cases.
Its customers include National Australia Bank, Morningstar and United Airlines, whose deployment times accelerated by 75% after using its tools, Harness said.
Major U.S. lenders JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, which have been vocal about AI-fueled productivity gains, are not only customers but also investors in Harness.
The blurring lines between client and owner labels across AI startups have led to comparisons with dotcom-era financing structures.
"We have very strong collaborative partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, and AWS," Bansal said.
(Reporting by Ateev Bhandari in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona and Mrigank Dhaniwala)
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