Artificial Intelligence (AI) software delivery platform Harness Inc has bought select assets of AI coding platform Augment Code for an undisclosed amount. This will give the autonomous software development life cycle (SDLC) platform greater control over how machines write code.
The deal includes Augment’s Cosmos, Auggie CLI products, the code context engine, and related technology. The teams behind these products will join Harness, accelerating its work to make the entire software development lifecycle increasingly autonomous.
“With this acquisition, we are extending into the coding cycle. If you have the right context when writing code, you can produce safer and more secure code from the start. Because Harness runs processes across testing, security, compliance, and governance, we have context about how an organisation operates. Bringing that context into coding can improve the code before it reaches later checks,” Harness Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jyoti Bansal told Business Standard in an interaction.
Bansal, well known as the founder of business software company AppDynamics which Cisco bought for about $3.7 billion in 2017, explained his goal is an autonomous SDLC from idea to production. The company, headquartered in San Francisco, is valued at $5.5 billion after its 2025 Series E fundraise of $240 million.
“That is what bringing Augment Code into Harness extends. Augment Code has a product called Cosmos, a software factory. An idea or ticket comes in, and a set of agents turns it into code. A developer is brought into the loop when needed. We plan to bring the Cosmos software factory into the Harness platform so the process can run end to end,” he added.
Harness focuses on the bottlenecks that arise after codes are written. While machines have started generating millions of lines of codes across enterprises, they still have to be checked and tested by humans for guardrails, quality controls, and security to fix vulnerabilities. It thus brings AI to testing, deployment, security, compliance, and cost optimization, which can account for 70-80 per cent of the time after code is written.
Asked about the reason for the acquisition, Bansal said agents are only as good as the context they receive. “When coding context is combined with data from testing, security, compliance, and incidents, the AI can write better code from the start. Code may otherwise fail later because of quality or security issues. Bringing that context in earlier is the biggest advantage of connecting the two more closely,” he said.
Harness, whose clients include Citibank, United Airlines, and PayPal, expects to touch cumulative revenue of about $400 million by the end of 2026, with banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) contributing almost 30 per cent. The company has 1,300 people globally, with 500 in India.
“We set out to bring AI to the entire SDLC, starting with context-aware coding,” said Igor Ostrovsky, cofounder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Augment Code. “Joining Harness is the next step towards that vision. Together, we can make engineering work increasingly autonomous, with engineers stepping in only where judgment really matters,” he said.
