From IIT Delhi to billionaire: Jyoti Bansal builds second $5.5B company

Bansal builds second billion-dollar company (LinkedIn/Jyoti Bansal)

Indian-born entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal has joined the billionaire ranks after building two billion-dollar companies, most recently Harness, an AI-based software delivery platform that has raised $240 million at a lofty valuation, according to Forbes.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, Bansal grew up in a small town in Rajasthan. He has said that early exposure to global tech success stories shaped his ambitions. Recalling a visit by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to an IIT campus and the rise of Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia, Bansal told Forbes: “That's what brought me to Silicon Valley.”

At 21, Bansal moved to California with only a few hundred dollars and a clear goal of becoming an entrepreneur. However, US visa restrictions forced him to put that dream on hold. As an H-1B visa holder, he was required to work before starting a company, spending seven years as an engineer at three small enterprise technology firms that sponsored his visa.

“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 said. “I had to wait for some time until I got a green card.” Bansal later became a US citizen in 2016.

After securing his green card, Bansal founded AppDynamics in 2008, a platform designed to troubleshoot complex websites and reduce downtime for companies such as Netflix. He spent more than a decade scaling the business through six fundraising rounds.

“I strongly believe to build a company, you have to spend a lot of time on it,” he told Forbes. “Ten years at least.”

When AppDynamics was generating over $200 million in revenue and preparing for an IPO, Bansal instead sold the company to Cisco for an estimated $3.7 billion, significantly boosting his personal wealth.

Following the sale, Bansal attempted retirement but quickly found it unsatisfying. “I tried to retire,” he 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.”

That decision led to the launch of Harness, which focuses on improving how software is tested and delivered. “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,” Bansal said, adding: “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.”

Harness recently raised $240 million in a Series E funding round backed by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Institutional Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, valuing the company at $5.5 billion. According to Forbes estimates, Bansal’s net worth stands at around $2.3 billion, largely driven by his 30% stake in Harness and proceeds from the AppDynamics sale.