Goldman Investment Helps AI Firm Harness Reach $5 Billion Valuation

Software company Harness has been valued at $5.5 billion following its latest funding round.

The firm’s Series E, announced Thursday (Dec. 11), was led by Goldman Sachs and brought in $200 million.

“AI has rewritten the first half of software engineering,” Jyoti Bansal, Harness co-founder and CEO, wrote on the company blog.

“The second half — everything after code — is where the next chapter will be defined. Delivering software safely, reliably, and with confidence is bound to be the biggest differentiator for modern engineering teams.”

He added that the “investment accelerates our ability to build the systems that make that possible: unified intelligence, deep context, and automation that brings clarity to complexity.”

A news release on the funding round delves into the basis behind Harness’ work, noting that although artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way software is written, that work is just the start of the engineering lifecycle.

Most teams spend just 30–40% of their time “writing and iterating” on code,  the company added, with the bulk of their workdays focused on things like testing, deployments, security, compliance, and optimization.

“These workflows are deeply interconnected and remain highly manual, creating friction that slows velocity,” the release said. “Harness is bringing AI and automation to this outer loop, turning the most complex and time-consuming parts of software delivery into intelligent, streamlined processes.”

A report on the round by CNBC notes that this investment comes amid a wave of venture funding for startups that sell subscriptions for tools for directing AI models to write and update software.

That report added that Harness recently expanded its cybersecurity offering by merging with Traceable, another startup co-founded by Bansal.

In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote Thursday about findings from the recent report “Prompt Economy: When Bots Are the Customer,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa. It shows that agentic AI tools such as Amazon’s Rufus, Walmart’s Sparky, Google’s AI-enabled Chrome, and Windows’ Model Context Protocol have become a new class of “customer” within the retail world.

Shoppers in the 21st century, PYMNTS wrote, increasingly start their journey with a prompt instead of a search bar, giving AI assistants instructions such as “find a black organic cotton tee under $40 or a gift that ships by Friday,” to use one example.

“AI customers don’t care about beautiful homepages or cinematic campaigns. They cannot be dazzled by product photography,” the report said.

“They evaluate brands through an entirely different lens: structured data quality, machine-readable policies, endpoint reliability, and fulfillment performance. This shift is creating a dual-consumer reality unlike anything retailers have experienced.”

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