AppDynamics
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Harness hauls in $60M Series B investment on $500M valuation
Series B rounds used to be about establishing a product-market fit, but for some startups the whole process seems to be accelerating. Harness, the startup founded by AppDynamics co-founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal is one of those companies that is putting the pedal the metal with his second startup, taking his learnings and a $60 million round to build the company much more quickly.
Harness already has an eye-popping half billion dollar valuation. It’s not terribly often I hear valuations in a Series B discussion. More typically CEOs want to talk growth rates, but Bansal volunteered the information, excited by the startup’s rapid development.
The round was led by IVP, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and ServiceNow Ventures. Existing investors Big Labs, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $80 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Bansal obviously made a fair bit of money when he sold AppDynamics to Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion and he could have rested after his great success. Instead he turned his attention almost immediately to a new challenge, helping companies move to a new continuous delivery model more rapidly by offering Continuous Delivery as a Service.
As companies move to containers and the cloud, they face challenges implementing new software delivery models. As is often the case, large web scale companies like Facebook, Google and Netflix have the resources to deliver these kinds of solutions quickly, but it’s much more difficult for most other companies.
Bansal saw an opportunity here to package continuous delivery approaches as a service. “Our approach in the market is Continuous Delivery as a Service, and instead of you trying to engineer this, you get this platform that can solve this problem and bring you the best tooling that a Google or Facebook or Netflix would have,” Basal explained.
The approach has gained traction quickly. The company has grown from 25 employees at launch in 2017 to 100 today. It boasts 50 enterprise customers including Home Depot, Santander Bank and McAfee.
He says that the continuous delivery piece could just be a starting point, and the money from the round will be plowed back into engineering efforts to expand the platform and solve other problems DevOps teams face with a modern software delivery approach.
Bansal admits that it’s unusual to have this kind of traction this early, and he says that his growth is much faster than it was at AppDynamics at the same stage, but he believes the opportunity here is huge as companies look for more efficient ways to deliver software. “I’m a little bit surprised. I thought this was a big problem when I started, but it’s an even bigger problem than I thought and how much pain was out there and how ready the market was to look at a very different way of solving this problem,” he said.
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New tool uses AI to roll back problematic continuous delivery builds automatically
As companies shift to CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), they face a problem around monitoring and fixing problems in builds that have been deployed. How do you deal with an issue after moving onto the next delivery milestone? Harness, the startup launched last year by AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal, wants to fix that with a new tool called 24×7 Service Guard.
The new tool is designed to help companies working with a continuous delivery process by monitoring all of the builds, regardless of when they were launched. What’s more, the company claims that using AI and machine learning, it can dial back a problematic build to one that worked in an automated fashion, freeing developers and operations to keep working without worry.
The company launched last year with a tool called Continuous Verification to verify that a continuous delivery build got deployed. With today’s announcement, Bansal says the company is taking this to another level to help understand what happens after you deploy.
The tool watches every build, even days after deployment, taking advantage of data from tools like AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic and Splunk, then using AI and machine learning to identify problems and bring them back to a working state without human intervention. What’s more, your team can get a unified view of performance and the quality of every build across all of your monitoring and logging tools.
“People are doing Continuous Delivery and struggling with it. They are also using these AI Ops kinds of products, which are watching things in production, and trying to figure out what’s wrong. What we are doing is we’re bringing the two together and ensuring nothing goes wrong,” Bansal explained.
24×7 Service Guard Console. Screenshot: Harness
He says that he brought this product to market because he saw enterprise companies struggling with CI/CD. He said the early messaging that you should move fast and break things really doesn’t work in enterprise settings. They need tooling that ensures that critical applications will keep running even with continuous builds (however you define that). “How do you enable developers so that they can move fast and make sure the business doesn’t get impacted. I feel that industry was underserved by this [earlier] message,” he said.
While it’s hard for any product to absolutely guarantee up-time, this one is providing tooling for companies who see the value of CI/CD, but are looking for a way to keep their applications up and running, so they aren’t constantly on this deploy/repair treadmill. If it works as described, it could help advance CI/CD, especially for large companies that need to learn to move faster and want assurances that when things break, they can be fixed in an automated fashion.
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Instana raises $30M for its application performance monitoring service
Instana, an application performance monitoring (APM) service with a focus on modern containerized services, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Meritech Capital, with participation from existing investor Accel. This brings Instana’s total funding to $57 million.
The company, which counts the likes of Audi, Edmunds.com, Yahoo Japan and Franklin American Mortgage as its customers, considers itself an APM 3.0 player. It argues that its solution is far lighter than those of older players like New Relic and AppDynamics (which sold to Cisco hours before it was supposed to go public). Those solutions, the company says, weren’t built for modern software organizations (though I’m sure they would dispute that).
What really makes Instana stand out is its ability to automatically discover and monitor the ever-changing infrastructure that makes up a modern application, especially when it comes to running containerized microservices. The service automatically catalogs all of the endpoints that make up a service’s infrastructure, and then monitors them. It’s also worth noting that the company says that it can offer far more granular metrics that its competitors.
Instana says that its annual sales grew 600 percent over the course of the last year, something that surely attracted this new investment.
“Monitoring containerized microservice applications has become a critical requirement for today’s digital enterprises,” said Meritech Capital’s Alex Kurland. “Instana is packed with industry veterans who understand the APM industry, as well as the paradigm shifts now occurring in agile software development. Meritech is excited to partner with Instana as they continue to disrupt one of the largest and most important markets with their automated APM experience.”
The company plans to use the new funding to fulfill the demand for its service and expand its product line.
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Now part of Cisco, AppDynamics update looks to deepen understanding of business performance
When Cisco acquired AppDynamics in January for $3.7 billion, it was a big surprise as the company was on the verge of going public. While it’s probably too soon to say how intertwined it will become in the Cisco product family, it continues to march forward announcing an update to the products set at the AppD Summit this week in New York City.
Today’s announcements build on the… Read More
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Cisco using AI and machine learning to help IT predict failures
We have known for some time that the number of signals coming from your IT systems surpassed the ability for humans to keep track of them years ago. Machines can help and have been for some time. The advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning has accelerated that ability and today, Cisco announced that it is using these technologies to help customers find failures before they… Read More
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AppDynamics update pinpoints performance issues inside Docker containers
AppDynamics released an update today with a nod toward the growing trend of containerization. The company, which was purchased by Cisco earlier this year for $3.7 billion, wants to help customers using Docker containers pinpoint performance issues. Cisco-AppDynamics $3.7 billion deal all about the data
When Cisco bought AppDynamics last night for $3.7 billion, it was initially a bit of a shocker, partly because of the timing, just days before the startup was scheduled to IPO. While the acquisition was clearly part of a longer term strategy by Cisco to shift focus from its hardware business to one based more on cloud software, at its core, the deal was a pure data play. Data has taken… Read More
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Why the $3.7 billion AppDynamics acquisition happened right before IPO
Applications management company AppDynamics was just wrapping up the final touches on its initial public offering when it learned that Cisco was interested in discussing a potential deal. Preliminary talks were abandoned in November, but the discussion just picked up again last week. The deal was announced today and the IPO was slated to price tomorrow. Although many companies seek… Read More
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Cisco snaps up AppDynamics for $3.7B right before its IPO
Cisco said today that it would acquire AppDynamics, which helps companies monitor application performance, for a whopping $3.7 billion. And now, it would seem that AppDynamics’ long-awaited IPO (this week!) has been called off in favor of a giant acquisition. It isn’t Cisco’s first major acquisition in recent memory — in fact, the company has been quite active —… Read More
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AppDynamics update looks to measure impact of performance on business
It seems to have been the week for modern application performance monitoring tools to announce major updates. First, New Relic announced theirs on Monday and today AppDynamics followed suit with its own update to provide more direct insight into business performance — not just the underlying systems and applications. Both messages are remarkably similar, even the platform naming. On… Read More
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