Even as the Donald Trump administration tightens immigration rules and places stricter limits on H-1B visas, an India-born entrepreneur has emerged as the newest tech billionaire in Silicon Valley. Jyoti Bansal, who hails from Rajasthan and studied at IIT-Delhi, has joined the ranks of America’s tech billionaires after the rapid rise of his artificial intelligence startup, Harness.
Bansal entered billionaire territory after Harness raised $240 million at a valuation of $5.5 billion, according to Forbes. The milestone comes at a time when US immigration policies are becoming more restrictive for skilled foreign professionals. Bansal has been an outspoken critic of these policies, arguing that visa curbs deprive American companies of global talent and innovation.
Bansal grew up in a small town in Rajasthan, where he helped his father run a farming machinery business. His academic aptitude took him to IIT-Delhi, where he studied computer engineering. At the age of 21, he moved to the United States with limited savings but strong ambitions to build a career in technology.
For nearly a decade, he worked as an engineer at three enterprise technology firms that sponsored his H-1B visa. These years shaped his views on immigration, as he experienced firsthand the constraints faced by skilled workers on temporary visas. He became a US citizen in 2016 but continued to argue that restrictive visa rules prevent talented professionals from building companies when their ideas are strongest.
His first major entrepreneurial breakthrough came in 2008 with the founding of AppDynamics, a company that developed software to help large organisations monitor complex applications and resolve technical issues before they escalated. As digital transformation accelerated, demand for AppDynamics’ tools surged, and the company crossed $200 million in annual revenue.
In January 2017, just days before AppDynamics was set to go public, Cisco acquired the firm for $3.7 billion. The deal made Bansal extremely wealthy at the age of 39. He stepped away from work for a period, travelling extensively and taking time off from the startup world.
However, the break did not last. Bansal realised that entrepreneurship, rather than retirement, was his natural calling. Drawing on his earlier experience, he identified a major inefficiency in software development, noting that most effort went into testing, security and deployment rather than writing code itself.
This insight led to the creation of Harness, a company focused on automating and streamlining the software delivery process using artificial intelligence. The platform helps enterprises test, secure and deploy code faster, a capability that has become even more critical as generative AI increases the volume of software being written.
Harness has since grown into a major player in enterprise software, attracting high-profile clients such as United Airlines and Citi. The latest funding round, led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Institutional Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, valued the company at $5.5 billion and pushed Bansal’s estimated net worth to around $2.3 billion.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Harness employs over 1,200 people and is growing at roughly 50% year on year. At a time of intensifying immigration debates and H-1B restrictions, Jyoti Bansal’s rise stands out as a powerful example of how Indian-origin entrepreneurs continue to contribute significantly to the US technology ecosystem and economic growth.
