New York: Jyoti Bansal, an Indian-born technology entrepreneur who has built and sold one multibillion-dollar company and then gone on to create another, has entered the billionaire ranks, driven most recently by the soaring valuation of his AI-powered software firm, Harness, according to Forbes.
Bansal’s journey began far from Silicon Valley. Raised in a small town in Rajasthan, he later earned a degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, where early exposure to global technology leaders shaped his ambitions. He has recalled how moments such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates visiting an IIT campus, along with the rapid success of Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia, convinced him that world-changing companies could be built by Indians on a global stage. “That’s what brought me to Silicon Valley,” he told Forbes.
At 21, Bansal arrived in California with little money but a clear goal: to start his own company. Immigration rules, however, delayed that plan. As an H-1B visa holder, he was required to work for employers who sponsored his stay, preventing him from launching a business of his own. He spent seven years as an engineer at three small enterprise software firms, using the time to deepen his technical and industry knowledge while waiting for permanent residency.
Bansal has been openly critical of those restrictions. He has described it as ironic that skilled immigrants are barred from creating companies and jobs while on temporary visas. That barrier was removed once he obtained a green card, and in 2016 he became a US citizen.
In 2008, Bansal founded AppDynamics, a company focused on helping businesses monitor and fix problems in complex digital systems. The platform gained traction with large corporate clients, including Netflix, by reducing outages and improving website performance. Bansal spent more than a decade building the company, steering it through six funding rounds and steady growth.
For Bansal, patience was central to the process. He has said that meaningful companies are not built quickly, often requiring ten years or more of sustained effort. By the time AppDynamics was generating over $200 million in annual revenue and preparing to go public, it had become a significant force in enterprise software.
Rather than taking the company public, Bansal chose to sell it. In 2017, Cisco acquired AppDynamics for an estimated $3.7 billion, a deal that sharply increased Bansal’s personal wealth and marked a major milestone in his career.
After the sale, he briefly stepped away from work, but the pause did not last. Retirement, he found, did not suit him. He has said that leisure activities held little appeal compared with the challenge of building something new. That realization led him back to entrepreneurship.
His next venture, Harness, focuses on a less visible but critical part of software development: testing and delivery. Bansal has often noted that writing code is only a fraction of the work involved in launching reliable software, with much of the effort devoted to making sure systems run smoothly after deployment.
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. Forbes estimates Bansal’s net worth at about $2.3 billion, largely reflecting his stake in Harness and the proceeds from the AppDynamics sale.
