Jyoti Bansal
Jyoti Bansal is a prominent Indian‑American technology entrepreneur best known for founding AppDynamics and for building multiple billion‑dollar companies, including Harness. He created the startup studio BIG Labs to turn ideas into companies, co‑founded the venture firm Unusual Ventures, and in 2025 led the merger of Harness and Traceable into a single company operating under the Harness brand, where he serves as CEO.
Bansal grew up in Rajasthan, India, and studied computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He moved to Silicon Valley in 2000 and worked at startups before founding his own company.
Career
In April 2008, Bansal founded his first start‑up, AppDynamics, an application performance management company. The company provides tools for monitoring, diagnosing and troubleshooting performance slowdowns and other glitches in software code. Bansal led the company as CEO for the first eight years, from its founding until September 2015, and then as chairman and chief strategist through its sale to Cisco Systems. AppDynamics filed for an initial public offering in December 2016. The company was due to open for public trade in January 2017 when a deal was reached, just days before, for the sale of the company to Cisco Systems. Cisco announced the acquisition for about $3.7 billion on January 24, 2017, and the transaction closed on March 22, 2017.
BIG Labs
In 2017, Bansal launched BIG Labs, a startup studio designed to research big problem areas, prototype solutions and spin out companies. BIG Labs incubated Harness as its first project, followed later by Traceable.
Harness
Harness began inside BIG Labs in 2017 to automate how engineering teams build, test and release software, so organizations can ship updates faster and more reliably. The company later broadened into developer productivity, cloud‑cost control and application security. In April 2022, Harness raised $230 million at a $3.7 billion valuation; in 2025, Harness and Traceable merged, and the combined company continues under the Harness name with Bansal as CEO.
Traceable
Bansal co‑founded Traceable out of BIG Labs to protect application programming interfaces —the connections between modern services—by discovering and mapping API traffic, detecting suspicious behavior and helping block attacks. The company raised a total of $110 million across a $20 million Series A, a $60 million Series B and a $30 million strategic round. Harness and Traceable announced a definitive merger on February 10, 2025; the transaction closed on March 4, 2025, and the combined company operates as Harness.
Unusual Ventures
Bansal co‑founded Unusual Ventures, a seed‑stage venture firm that provides hands‑on help to reach product‑market fit and first customers. The firm launched Fund I at $160 million, closed Fund II at $400 million and closed Fund III at $485 million.
Recognition and board service
Bansal received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2016. He has also served as board chair of OneProsper International, a nonprofit supporting women farmers in India. He is listed as an inventor on more than 30 patents in areas such as distributed systems and software monitoring, and he frequently writes and speaks about software engineering and startup scaling, contributing to outlets and events such as Inc. and First Round Review. He has also been cited in U.S. immigration policy discussions as an example of an H‑1B professional who waited seven years for a green card before founding AppDynamics, which grew to employ more than 2,000 people.