Jyoti Bansal

Bansal comes from a small town in Rajasthan, India, and earned a B.S. in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.⁠[1][2]

After moving to the United States he first worked at Applion Networks, headquartered in New Jersey, and then moved to Silicon Valley, working at a distributed-computing startup, a manufacturing data-mining startup later sold to Rockwell Automation, and Wily Technology, which CA Technologies acquired for $375 million.⁠[1]

Bansal founded the application performance monitoring company AppDynamics in 2008, signing its first Series A term sheet that year. He led it as chief executive for eight years and as chairman in its final year.⁠[1][2]

In 2017 Cisco acquired AppDynamics for $3.7 billion, a day before its planned initial public offering.⁠[1][2]

In 2017 Bansal launched BIG Labs, a startup studio for building products and companies around hard technical problems; the continuous delivery platform Harness, launched in 2017, was the first company spun out of BIG Labs, and Bansal co-founded it and serves as chief executive.⁠[2][1][3]

In 2018 Bansal co-founded the venture firm Unusual Ventures with John Vrionis, starting with a $160 million seed fund; the firm later had more than $1 billion under management.⁠[2][1]

On February 2, 2019, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry published the podcast episode “a16z Podcast: Product-Market Sales Fit (What Comes First?),” hosted by Sonal Chokshi, in which Bansal spoke with a16z general partner Peter Levine and enterprise deal team partner Satish Talluri, a former AppDynamics employee; the video was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on February 26, 2019.⁠[4][5]

The episode covered the relationship between product-market fit and go-to-market, how product design should reflect freemium, self-serve or enterprise sales motions, AppDynamics’ combination of bottom-up developer adoption with top-down enterprise selling, sales organization for new products, and pricing and packaging. Bansal said “it’s a little bit misleading to just call it product-market fit,” proposing “product-market-sales fit” instead, and on pricing advised, “So, price higher. You can always discount.”⁠[4]

On February 10, 2025, Harness and the API security company Traceable (launched in 2020), both led by Bansal as chief executive, announced a merger; the combined company expected 2025 annualized revenue of about $250 million, up 50 percent, a valuation of about $5 billion and about 1,100 employees. “Software teams should not have to choose between speed and security when delivering innovation to their customers,” Bansal said.⁠[3]

On December 11, 2025, San Francisco–based Harness announced a $240 million Series E round led by Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry at a $5.5 billion valuation; the company had 1,564 employees. Bansal summarized its positioning as “AI for everything after code.”⁠[6]