How This Indian Immigrant Went From An H1-B Visa To Building A $5.5 Billion Business

Forbes

New billionaire Jyoti Bansal left Delhi with a few hundred dollars and built two billion-dollar companies, including Harness, which just raised $240 million at a huge valuation.  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonemelvin/2025/12/11/how-this-indian-immigrant-went-from-an-h1-b-visa-to-building-a-55-billion-business/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Today on Forbes, how this Indian immigrant went from an H-1B visa to building a $5.5 billion

00:07business. Jyoti Bansal sold his first company to Cisco in 2017 and then hit the road. He was on his

00:16second African safari, eyeing the now-familiar Savannah, when it dawned on him that over the

00:22past several months he had already hiked Machu Picchu, marveled at Norwegian fjords, and trekked

00:28across the Himalayas. He was only 39 years old, and there was nothing left on his bucket list.

00:34Speaking from his home office in San Francisco where he lives with his family, Bansal, who is now

00:3947, says, quote, I tried to retire. People say once I retire I'm going to do what I enjoy. I asked myself,

00:47do I enjoy playing golf all the time or being on the beach all the time? I don't really. I realized

00:53why not just go back to what I enjoy, building a company. So, he launched Harness, an AI-based

01:01software delivery platform that announced this past week that it had raised a $240 million Series E

01:07round from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Institutional Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures at a $5.5 billion

01:15valuation, enough to make Bansal a new billionaire. Forbes estimates his net worth is $2.3 billion,

01:23thanks to an estimated 30% stake in Harness and plenty of cash from selling his first company,

01:29AppDynamics, which diagnoses and troubleshoots software anomalies, to Cisco in 2017, mere days

01:36before it was set to IPO. Bansal's first venture inspired his second. He says, quote,

01:42The problem I was fascinated with at AppDynamics was when you ship software and a glitch happens

01:48or an outage happens, our software helps them fix it. People don't often realize writing code is just

01:53the first 30% of the job. Then you have the next 70% of the job to make sure you test that code properly.

02:02Harness uses AI agents to automate the manual labor of making sure code is secure and compliant

02:07with different regulations. Harness does this by breaking up the different tasks involved in

02:12shipping code, such as testing, optimizing, and securing that code by using AI to automate each

02:19of those steps. Bansal compares the technology to a physical safety harness. It sells its delivery

02:25software to companies ranging from United Airlines to Citi to reduce an engineer's toil of testing and

02:31deploying code. Bansal says, quote, If you bring a trillion dollars of efficiency to the world,

02:38people will gladly pay you at least 10% of what you save them. He's not quite at a trillion. The

02:44company generates closer to a quarter of a billion so far. But generative AI is making the service that

02:50much more mission critical. While most of its revenue comes from the continuous delivery business,

02:56Harness runs 16 other related products under its business, such as cybersecurity company,

03:01Traceable, a separate company that Bansal founded and later merged with Harness that prevents hackers

03:06from attacking a company's code through its interface systems. Steve Harick, a partner at

03:12Institutional Venture Partners, which has funded all three of Bansal's businesses, in addition to

03:17companies like Discord, Klarna, and Slack, says, quote, That's what he calls a startup within a startup.

03:24When he came to pitch Harness in 2017, he didn't only pitch continuous software delivery.

03:29He laid out a roadmap for the next five to seven modules they were going to do.

03:34Harness continues, quote, It's a very ambitious way to build a company. But in our first meeting,

03:40Bansal showed me a 10-year progression to a billion dollars in revenue. And he said,

03:44That's what we're going to do. I'm pleased to say that he's on track.

03:48Bansal grew up helping his dad with his farming machinery business in a small town in India's

03:55Rajasthan state, before testing into Delhi's Indian Institute of Technology for computer engineering.

04:01There, he says, he became enamored with entrepreneurship, recalling a campus visit

04:05from Bill Gates and reading about an alumnus legend, Sabir Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail.

04:11At 21 years old, he hopped on a plane to California with a few hundred dollars and dreams of getting

04:18a green card and starting his own company. But first, he had to work. He spent seven years

04:23as an engineer at three small enterprise tech companies, which sponsored his H-1B visa.

04:30For full coverage, check out Simone Melvin's piece on Forbes.com.

04:35This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.

04:39Thanks for tuning in.

04:40Thanks for tuning in.

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