‘If you’re on an H1-B visa…’: Indian-origin Jyoti Bansal explains how he made billions of dollars from scratch |

Indian-born entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal has become a new billionaire after building Harness, an AI-based software delivery platform valued at $5.5 billion. Bansal grew up in a small town in Rajasthan, India, and arrived in the United States on an H1-B visa with only a few hundred dollars and the dream of starting his own company. Today, his net worth at $2.3 billion, according to Forbes. It was all thanks to his 30 per cent stake in Harness and proceeds from the sale of his first company, AppDynamics, to Cisco in 2017.Bansal first founded AppDynamics in 2008 after securing a green card. The company helped large platforms like Netflix and Priceline diagnose and fix software glitches, reducing downtime and improving performance. He recalls, “Netflix was just starting their streaming business and moving everything online. Imagine you’re a consumer on Netflix who gets frustrated because video is buffering. So some of our initial customers were companies like [Netflix], where we help their engineers to make sure no glitches happen or if glitches happen, they can fix them very fast.” After several funding rounds, AppDynamics was preparing for an IPO, but Cisco purchased the company for $3.7 billion. “We were about to list on Nasdaq and ring the bell on a Thursday in January of 2017,” Bansal says. He walked away with hundreds of millions, though AppDynamics now generates over $1 billion in revenue for Cisco.Following a brief attempt at retirement, Bansal launched Harness, aiming to reduce the manual work involved in testing and deploying software code. “The whole world is running on code, whether banking or transactions or airlines or everything–and that code needs a safety harness,” he said. Harness uses AI agents to automate tasks such as testing, optimisation, and compliance, allowing engineers to focus on more important work. The platform now serves major clients, including United Airlines and Citi. Bansal said: “If AI is helping write, the volume of code is going up something like 10 times and now people are struggling to test it all.”Harness also includes 16 related products, including cybersecurity company Traceable, which Bansal founded and later merged into Harness to protect against cyberattacks. Since its founding, Harness has raised $570 million, employs over 1,200 people, and is growing at 50 per cent annually. Bansal hopes to take the company public in the future. “We want to IPO. We didn’t get to do it last time,” he said.Bansal’s journey began at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, where he studied computer engineering. He was inspired by campus visits from Bill Gates and the success of alumnus Sabeer Bhatia, cofounder of Hotmail, and he decided to move to Silicon Valley. “The challenge unfortunately is if you’re on an H1-B visa, you’re not allowed to start a company and create more jobs, which I find very ironic,” he said. Bansal became an American citizen in 2016 and wants to attract more global talent. “Anything that removes that advantage to me is short-term thinking and is not good for us as a country.”