Harness, a continuous delivery startup, launched today with an initial Series A funding of $20 million. The company's CEO and founder, Jyoti Bansal, was the founder of AppDynamics. Cisco purchased AppDynamics for $3.7 billion nine months ago.

Harness' Series A was led by Menlo Ventures and BIG Labs, Bansal’s newly launched startup studio. Bansal is joined by Rishi Singh as co-founder and CTO. Singh previously served as a DevOps platform architect at Apple.

Harness seeks to help its customers deliver new software and technology faster, and without error with its continuous delivery platform.

“One thing I always heard from customers at AppDynamics was they wanted to move fast to deliver changes to their software applications,” said Bansal. “We thought if you really want to automate the delivery of these complex software applications, and if you really want to make sure nothing ever breaks, you have to bring in a layer of artificial intelligence [AI].”

By integrating this layer of AI into Harness, the platform learns and understands the application’s environment, enabling Harness to initiate automatic rollbacks when errors are detected, avoid application downtime, and continuously and automatically verify application deployments and changes. Current manual-deployment models of software delivery are risk prone and can take months to deploy. With Harness, Bansal says companies can deploy in weeks or hours and reduce errors by 99 percent.

Harness has already completed from 25 to 30 select beta installations for a variety of customers from financial service companies to tech companies. In these installations Bansal said the companies have been able to redistribute their engineering talent, reduce production outages, and deploy high-quality releases.

“The way I look at this is that it’s a problem that needs to be solved,” said Bansal. “Everyone is trying to solve the symptoms, and that doesn’t make sense. The business impact value that we can provide to our customers is very innovative.”

Harness is the first project to be launched out of Bansal’s startup studio BIG Labs, which also launched today. Bansal invested $50 million of his own capital into BIG Labs to experiment with new technologies.

The goal for the lab is to find new, viable products that solve large problems. Big Labs will create, build, and launch new companies to support prototypes, solutions, and research conducted and built in the lab.

BIG Labs contributed $5 million of the startup’s Series A funding.

Harness plans to take its Series A funding and continue to invest in the startup’s research and development to meet the needs of a wider set of customers of all technological backgrounds.

The startup currently supports Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform but has plans to expand to Microsoft Azure Cloud, and other cloud environments.