San Francisco’s Harness Inc. today divulged that it has closed an $85 million funding round to broaden the adoption and feature set of its software delivery platform, which is used by developers at companies such as Cisco Systems Inc. to build applications faster.

The round values the startup at $1.7 billion.

In a bid to run their internal software projects more efficiently, many enterprises are adopting a development approach known as continuous integration and continuous delivery or CI/CD. The idea is to release small code updates frequently rather than big, complicated updates every few months. The efficiency gains come from operational benefits such as the fact that smaller updates can be fixed faster if they happen to contain a bug. 

But though the goal is to boost productivity, CI/CD comes with its own set of time sinks, which is what Harness is helping its customers overcome. Implementing CI/CD workflows normally requires cobbling together multiple development automation tools into complex toolchains and writing scripts to manage software releases. Harness’ value proposition is that it replaces such custom toolchains with a single platform designed to be easier to set up and use.

Harness claims that one client, LogMeIn Inc., saved a million dollars in engineering productivity by adopting its platform. Another user, British software maker Advanced Computer Software Group Ltd., reported it completed an internal CI/CD initiative in three months instead of the three years it was expecting.

Speeding up the creation of CI/CD workflows isn’t the only benefit Harness promises. The startup’s platform can also help speed up developers’ day-to-day work after the initial setup is done. Alongside its core CI/CD capabilities for rolling out software, Harness’ platform provides time-saving features such as a machine learning tool that automatically detects and reverses faulty updates.

The startup says its annual recurring revenues more than doubled last year off an undisclosed base, following a 249% increase in the number of companies using its platform. Besides providing a glimpse into the startup’s growth, those numbers are also reflective of the strong spending momentum in the broader DevOps tooling market. According to research from International Data Corp., the market for DevOps solutions is expected to grow to $15 billion in 2023 from $5.2 billion in 2018.

With the new $85 million in funding, Harness plans to intensify its efforts to target that opportunity by launching an initiative to “grow its world-class engineering team, support global expansion plans” and extend its platform’s feature set, the startup said. Alkeon Capital led the group of investors that provided the funding. Among the other participants were Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Sorenson Capital and Thomvest Ventures. 

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