Jyoti Bansal arrived in US on an H-1B visa. Now he's the newest billionaire on the block

Indian-born entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal has become a new billionaire after building Harness, an AI-based software delivery company valued at $5.5 billion. According to Forbes, his net worth is estimated at $2.3 billion. His rise has renewed focus on the H-1B visa route, as debates continue in the US over skilled immigration and tighter scrutiny of the programme.

Bansal moved to the United States from India on an H-1B visa with only a few hundred dollars and the ambition to build a technology company. While the visa allowed him to work, it limited his ability to start a business in the early years. At present, the H-1B system is facing upheaval, with policy changes, compliance checks, and uncertainty creating concern among global professionals and US employers alike.

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Building AppDynamics
After securing a green card, Bansal founded AppDynamics in 2008. The company helped large digital platforms detect and fix software problems quickly, reducing downtime. Early customers included Netflix and Priceline. He described the early use case, telling Forbes, “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.”

AppDynamics was preparing for a public listing when Cisco acquired the company in 2017 for $3.7 billion. Recalling that moment, Bansal said, “We were about to list on Nasdaq and ring the bell on a Thursday in January of 2017.” He earned hundreds of millions from the deal, while AppDynamics now generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue for Cisco.

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Harness and the AI Push
After a short break, Bansal returned with Harness, a platform designed to reduce manual work in testing and deploying software. Explaining the idea, he said, “The whole world is running on code, whether banking or transactions or airlines or everything–and that code needs a safety harness.”

Harness uses AI agents to automate testing, optimisation, and compliance. The platform serves clients such as United Airlines and Citi. On the impact of AI on software development, 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.”

The company includes 16 related products, including cybersecurity firm Traceable, which Bansal founded and later merged into Harness. Since its founding, Harness has raised $570 million, employs over 1,200 people, and is growing at 50 per cent annually. Bansal has said he plans to take the company public. “We want to IPO. We didn't get to do it last time,” he said.

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Bansal's IIT beginnings
Bansal studied computer engineering at IIT Delhi and was influenced by campus visits from Bill Gates and the success of Hotmail cofounder Sabeer Bhatia. He moved to Silicon Valley despite visa constraints. Reflecting on that period, he said, “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.”

Now a US citizen since 2016, Bansal has spoken about the need to attract global talent at a time when immigration rules are under renewed debate. He said, “Anything that removes that advantage to me is short-term thinking and is not good for us as a country.”