Eight years after selling AppDynamics to Cisco, Jyoti Bansal is pursuing an unusual merger
Jyoti Bansal, co-founder and CEO of startup Harness.
Harness
Jyoti Bansal knows about weird acquisitions.
Eight years ago, his software company, AppDynamics, was on the doorstep of a blockbuster IPO. A day before the offering, Cisco swooped in and bought the company for $2.7 billion
Now Bansal is at the center of an equally unconventional combination.
Since 2020, Bansal has been running two startups as co-founder and CEO: Harness and Traceable. The former’s technology helps companies manage code and the latter’s software observes where companies are unintentionally letting out sensitive data.
Late this month or early next, Harness and Traceable will merge. The resulting company will have 1,100 employees, $250 million in expected 2025 annualized revenue, a 50% growth rate and a valuation of about $5 billion.
“It’s about the same size that AppDynamics was when we were about to go public,” Bansal told CNBC in an interview last week.
Through the combination, Bansal said, Harness will be able to sell more products to customers, and Traceable will be better insulated from competitors like HashiCorp, which IBM has agreed to buy, and Akamai, which acquired security startup Noname last year.
This time, Bansal wants an active stock ticker.
In an interview last year with CNBC’s Make It, Bansal said he was unfulfilled after selling AppDynamics and that he didn’t finish what he had started.
“Everyone told me, ‘You should retire. Go on the beach. What else do you need to do?'” Bansal said. “That was my first instinct, as well. I wanted to trek in the Himalayas, hike Machu Picchu, do a safari in Africa, see the fjords in Norway. In six months, my bucket list was done. And I started to realize: That’s not it for me.”
Bansal got back to work and set up Big Labs, a studio for exploring startup ideas. Big Labs spawned Harness in 2017 and then Traceable in 2020. Sanjay Nagaraj, Traceable’s other co-founder, recalled working on the security startup in a dedicated Big Labs room at Harness’ San Francisco headquarters.
The arrangement was unorthodox.
“I’ve never done this before, backed a CEO to run two companies simultaneously,” said Harrick, who joined Institutional Venture Partners in 2001 and sits on the boards of Harness and Traceable. “But Jyoti is that good. He’s not only a great executive, but he hires well and he delegates well, and so I just talked to Jyoti. I said, ‘This is a major risk.’ I got his assurance he wouldn’t do a third one.”
Establishing Harness and Traceable as separate companies made sense to Bansal at the time, because their products would typically get sold to different buyers within an organization. But that’s changed in the past year or two, he said, as engineering and technology leaders have started to also make decisions on procuring tools for securing code and data.
Employees took notice of the shift and, during all-hands meetings at both companies, would repeatedly ask Bansal about a consolidation, he said. Questions also came from clients.
“The Harness team would go set up a meeting with an executive at a bank or some of our customers,” Bansal said. “I would go into the meeting and the executive would say, ‘It’s a one-hour meeting. Can we save the last 15 minutes? Because I also want to talk about Traceable.'”
Bansal was effectively the first IT person at both companies, setting up the same Google productivity apps and Carta equity management software as each got started. A spokesperson said 70% of Traceable’s largest customers are Harness customers as well.
The cultures were also similar. As Harness and Traceable matured, Bansal picked a general manager to run each distinctive new product, or module. When examining revenue for the modules, executives at both startups rely on a theory that Battery Ventures investor Neeraj Agrawal calls “triple, triple, double, double, double,” or T2D3. The model, which Agrawal wrote about in TechCrunch in 2015, describes the annualized revenue growth that cloud software startups can target.
In November, Bansal told the two boards that his companies were on converging paths and that it would be difficult to keep them from competing with each other. He got clearance for a merger.
Initially, Traceable will operate as as its own unit within Harness, the parent company, and Nagaraj will be general manager. Bansal said the structure may change in the future.
He’s confident that the technologies will pair well together and can benefit from tighter integrations. Harness will be able to help clients understand the origin of their source code, and Traceable can show how people are using it.
Harrick calls it’s a good outcome, and said he’s excited to consolidate his bet on Bansal.
“I think it’s a benefit for all investors for him to focus on operating one company instead of two,” Harrick said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang introduces new products as he delivers the keynote address at the GTC AI Conference in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2025.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
At the end of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s unscripted two-hour keynote on Tuesday, his message was clear: Get the fastest chips that the company makes.
Speaking at Nvidia’s GTC conference, Huang said that questions clients have about the cost and return on investment the company’s graphics processors, or GPUs, will go away with faster chips that can be digitally sliced and used to serve artificial intelligence to millions of people at the same time.
“Over the next 10 years, because we could see improving performance so dramatically, speed is the best cost-reduction system,” Huang said in a meeting with journalists shortly after his GTC keynote.
The company dedicated 10 minutes during Huang’s speech to explain the economics of faster chips for cloud providers, complete with Huang doing envelope math out loud on each chip’s cost-per-token, a measure of how much it costs to create one unit of AI output.
Huang told reporters that he presented the math because that’s what’s on the mind of hyperscale cloud and AI companies.
The company’s Blackwell Ultra systems, coming out this year, could provide data centers 50 times more revenue than its Hopper systems because it’s so much faster at serving AI to multiple users, Nvidia says.
Investors worry about whether the four major cloud providers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle — could slow down their torrid pace of capital expenditures centered around pricey AI chips. Nvidia doesn’t reveal prices for its AI chips, but analysts say Blackwell can cost $40,000 per GPU.
Already, the four largest cloud providers have bought 3.6 million Blackwell GPUs, under Nvidia’s new convention that counts each Blackwell as 2 GPUs. That’s up from 1.3 million Hopper GPUs, Blackwell’s predecessor, Nvidia said Tuesday.
The company decided to announce its roadmap for 2027’s Rubin Next and 2028’s Feynman AI chips, Huang said, because cloud customers are already planning expensive data centers and want to know the broad strokes of Nvidia’s plans.
“We know right now, as we speak, in a couple of years, several hundred billion dollars of AI infrastructure” will be built, Huang said. “You’ve got the budget approved. You got the power approved. You got the land.”
Huang dismissed the notion that custom chips from cloud providers could challenge Nvidia’s GPUs, arguing they’re not flexible enough for fast-moving AI algorithms. He also expressed doubt that many of the recently announced custom AI chips, known within the industry as ASICs, would make it to market.
“A lot of ASICs get canceled,” Huang said. “The ASIC still has to be better than the best.”
Huang said his is focus on making sure those big projects use the latest and greatest Nvidia systems.
“So the question is, what do you want for several $100 billion?” Huang said.
Microsoft’s Amy Coleman (L) and Kathleen Hogan (R).
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft said Wednesday that company veteran Amy Coleman will become its new executive vice president and chief people officer, succeeding Kathleen Hogan, who has held the position for the past decade.
Hogan will remain an executive vice president but move to a newly established Office of Strategy and Transformation, which is an expansion of the office of the CEO. She will join Microsoft’s group of top executives, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella.
Coleman is stepping into a major role, given that Microsoft is among the largest employers in the U.S., with 228,000 total employees as of June 2024. She has worked at the company for more than 25 years over two stints, having first joined as a compensation manager in 1996.
Hogan will remain on the senior leadership team.
“Amy has led HR for our corporate functions across the company for the past six years, following various HR roles partnering across engineering, sales, marketing, and business development spanning 25 years,” Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.
“In that time, she has been a trusted advisor to both Kathleen and to me as she orchestrated many cross-company workstreams as we evolved our culture, improved our employee engagement model, established our employee relations team, and drove enterprise crisis response for our people,” he wrote.
Hogan arrived at Microsoft in 2003 after being a development manager at Oracle and a partner at McKinsey. Under Hogan, some of Microsoft’s human resources practices evolved. She has emphasized the importance of employees having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, drawing on concepts from psychologist Carol Dweck.
“We came up with some big symbolic changes to show that we really were serious about driving culture change, from changing the performance-review system to changing our all-hands company meeting, to our monthly Q&A with the employees,” Hogan said in a 2019 interview with Business Insider.
Hogan pushed for managers to evaluate the inclusivity of employees and oversaw changes in the handling of internal sexual harassment cases.
Coleman had been Microsoft’s corporate vice president for human resources and corporate functions for the past four years. In that role, she was responsible for 200 HR workers and led the development of Microsoft’s hybrid work approach, as well as the HR aspect of the company’s Covid response, according to her LinkedIn profile.
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