Exclusive: Jyoti Bansal-led Harness has raised $150 million in debt financing

When it comes to multi-company CEOs, we all know the usual suspects: Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Steve Jobs.

But there’s another fascinating founder doing double duty (actually triple duty) who isn’t a household name yet. Meet Jyoti Bansal.

Bansal sold AppDynamics to Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion. It was a wild deal, given that the transaction occurred the day before AppDynamics was slated to go public on the Nasdaq. Since then, Bansal’s story has become more incredible.

After exiting AppDynamics, he started another software delivery platform called Harness, serving as its CEO. He then cofounded and became CEO of Traceable AI. And then, for good measure, he cofounded a VC firm called Unusual Ventures.

Harness, last valued at $3.7 billion, has just reached a new milestone: The startup raised $150 million in debt financing from First Citizens-owned Silicon Valley Bank and Hercules Capital, Fortune has exclusively learned. The company will focus on expanding its generative AI and go-to-market capabilities and launching new product lines.

The debt raise is an interesting choice. Harness to date has raised more than $425 million from investors like Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and IVP. But debt made the most logical sense at this juncture, Bansal told Fortune. Right now, he said, the cost of capital from equity investors can be as high as 40%, while debt is closer to between 15% and 20% for late-stage companies.

“I don’t mind investors, but it’s a question of what the lowest cost of capital is for us,” said Bansal. “Capital is a means to an end. A lot of founders, especially in tech, treat fundraising like it's the goal…Sometimes I’ll look at a resume, and I’ll see ‘I raised $20 million, I raised $50 million’ like it’s an accomplishment. But what did you do with the $20 million?”

It’s a fair question. But that’s not the question I wanted to talk to Bansal about.

What makes someone want to keep founding startups, and in some cases, even run multiple startups at once? That’s the question the profile about Bansal that I published today is looking to answer.

Bansal’s story caught me off-guard, and I really owe the idea to Thomvest Ventures managing director Umesh Padval, a Harness investor. About six weeks ago, Padval and I were on a Zoom call getting to know one another and I told him I really wanted to try my hand at more profiles. I mentioned an idle interest in Bansal.

Padval stopped me right there, with vehemence: “You should absolutely do that, go do that right now,” he said. (I tell people my fleeting half-ideas all the time, but it’s pretty rare that someone feels so strongly about one of them, that they find a way to look me in the eyes through a Zoom.)

Harness represents unfinished business for Bansal, Padval told me.

“He had this desire to build AppDynamics to be a billion-dollar ARR company, and he never got to do it because he sold early,” said Padval. “So, he has this unfinished dream to build Harness into a billion-dollar ARR company.”

Padval also likened Bansal to a tech CEO who may run only one company, but it's an incredibly successful one: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, whose graphics chip company is now worth an astounding $2.3 trillion. No matter how many unicorns you build, that’s a big number.

I warned him there would be readers who think that comparison is crazy.

“Look, he’s young, the companies are young, so it takes time,” said Padval. “But every ten years, someone comes along and, to me, he really is the guy…He’s an execution machine like Jensen. He’s willing to make changes when it’s meaningful. At Harness, from 1 million to 50 million he had sales and marketing people, and when he reached 50, he changed the whole thing again, even though they were great people. He has the guts to do it.”

So, Padval’s conviction sent me in the direction of today’s story about Bansal, Harness, Traceable, AppDynamics, and venture. It’s a story about dreams realized and just-missed, about how real ambition ultimately requires humility—and about the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

If you want to see how it all fits together, you can read the story here.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com