Indian American tech entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal has joined the ranks of global billionaires after creating two companies valued at over $1 billion, one of them being Silicon Valley-based Harness. The software delivery firm, which uses artificial intelligence to help enterprises streamline how they build and release applications, has attracted strong investor interest in the U.S.
Reports indicate that Harness raised about $240 million in funding at a valuation that firmly places it in unicorn territory, cementing Bansal’s status as one of the most successful immigrant founders in the American tech ecosystem.
Bansal, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, was raised in a small town in Rajasthan before setting his sights on the U.S. tech world. He has often spoken about how seeing Bill Gates visit an IIT campus, along with the early success of fellow IIT graduate Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail fame, left a lasting impression on him. Those moments, he has said, sparked his ambition to build companies of his own and ultimately drew him to Silicon Valley, calling it “what brought me to Silicon Valley.”
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At just 21, Bansal moved to California with only a few hundred dollars to his name. He spent the next seven years building his career as a software engineer, working for U.S. tech companies that sponsored his H-1B visa, a phase he has described as formative in shaping both his technical skills and his understanding of the American startup ecosystem.
Bansal has also spoke candidly about the limits he faced early on as an immigrant worker in the U.S. “The challenge unfortunately is if you’re on an H1-B visa, you’re not allowed to start a company and create more jobs, which I find very ironic,” he told Forbes. As a result, he said, “I had to wait for some time until I got a green card.” He eventually became a U.S. citizen in 2016, a milestone that cleared the way for him to fully pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.
Harness recently secured $240 million in a Series E funding round, with participation from investors including Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Institutional Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures, according to Forbes. Bansal’s net worth is estimated at roughly $2.3 billion, driven in large part by his 30% ownership in Harness. His fortune also benefited from the 2017 sale of his first company, AppDynamics, to Cisco, which added a significant cash boost to his wealth.
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After the sale of his first company, Bansal embarked on a world tour, only to find that he had already ticked off everything on his personal bucket list, according to Forbes. “I tried to retire,” he told the outlet.
Reflecting on the idea of retirement, the billionaire said, “People say, ‘Once I retire, I’m going to do what I enjoy.’ I asked myself, ‘Do I enjoy playing golf all the time or being on the beach all the time?’ I don’t really. I realized why not just go back to what I enjoy, building a company.”
He also spoke about his passion for solving technical challenges, noting, “The problem I was fascinated with at AppDynamics was when you ship software and a glitch happens or an outage happens, [our software] helps them fix it.” He added, “People don’t often realize writing code is just the first 30% of the job. Then you have the next 70% of the job to make sure you test that code properly.”