Software delivery platform Harness today announced that it has acquired the assets of Armory, a continuous deployment startup built on top of the open source Spinnaker project. As Harness CEO and founder Jyoti Bansal told me, the acquisition price was about $7 million in cash. In total, Armory had raised more than $82 million, including a $40 million Series C round led by B Capital in late 2020. Other investors include Lead Edge Capital, Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Mango Capital, Y Combinator and Javelin Venture Partners.
Harness will hire many of Armory’s employees and Harness will continue to support existing Armory implementations. But Bansal also stressed that this is very much an asset deal. He does, of course, hope that many of Armory’s customers will migrate to the Harness platform over time, but he also stressed that he wants to help Armory’s existing customer base. “Our purpose mostly is to provide the kind of continuity of relationships and continuity of service to the customers. Over time, if we do the right things by customers, they can become even bigger Harness platform customers and Harness has a lot of offerings in our platform to help these accounts,” Bansal said.
Jim Douglas, ex-CEO of Wind River, took over from co-founder Daniel R. Odio as Armory’s CEO in 2021. Some of Armory’s current customers include LaunchDarkly, Autodesk, Informatica, Patreon, First Republic Bank and HelloSign.
Image Credits: Harness
This acquisition also follows the wider trends that have been playing out in the overall enterprise software ecosystem, where the current economic climate favors end-to-end solutions over single-point solutions as businesses look to consolidate and reduce their expenses. “The market is growing for DevOps solutions, but for single-point solutions, it’s hard to compete,” Bansal said. “The economic environment has been definitely challenging for a lot of startups to continue to raise capital. It’s good and bad. It’s good for companies like Harness, but at the same time I feel, from a startup ecosystem, yes, there are challenges right now and companies have to be operating at a much higher standard, than previously.”
Harness may implement some of Armory’s technology into its own products and Bansal stressed that he hopes that the experienced Armory engineers Harness plans to hire will also help it continue to innovate (and support the existing Armory customer base).
Talking about Harness in general, Bansal noted that he wants to build an enduring company that will, one day, go public. The last time he tried that, Cisco acquired his company AppDynamics for $3.7 billion right before it was scheduled to IPO.
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