Meet this IIT Delhi graduate who moved to the US at 21, waited 7 years to launch a startup, and built a $3.7 billion tech giant

Jyoti Bansal grew up and was born in India, and received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Early Life 

In 2000, when he was 21 years old, he moved to the United States with one goal in mind: to learn how great technology companies are built.

Silicon Valley, beaming with talent and ambition, made an immediate impression. Even the coffee shops, he once remembered, buzzed with conversations about ideas and companies in the making.

• Jyoti Bansal joined small enterprise software startups, 

• Learning about the mechanics of early-stage companies.

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The caveat in his journey 

There was, however, a catch. On an H-1B visa, he could not start a company himself. For seven years, he waited-frustrated, observant, and learning. Those years, watching both successes and failures up close, quietly became his apprenticeship.

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AppDynamics

The moment he got permanent residency, he knew it was time. He left his job and started AppDynamics in 2008. It addressed a growing but often underestimated issue: with software systems becoming increasingly intricate, an enterprise did not have real-time visibility into their application performance.

AppDynamics provided that insight, enabling companies to detect and fix issues before outages spiraled.

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AppDynamics acquired by Cisco

The startup scaled very quickly.

At its height, AppDynamics employed close to 2,000 people. In 2017, days before its IPO, Cisco acquired the company for $3.7 billion. Post that, Bansal indulged in some time to himself in travel, reading, etc.

As he later reflected, “I realized why not just go back to what I enjoy, building a company.” 

Birth of Harness & Traceable AI

That insight led to Harness, an AI-driven software delivery platform designed to automate testing, deployment, security, and compliance, which is touted to be the often invisible 70% of software work after code is written. 

Harness reached multi-billion-dollar valuations and was followed by Traceable AI, focused on application security.

Beyond operating companies, Jyoti Bansal has become a prolific mentor and investor. 

• He founded BIG Labs to back technically ambitious startups 

• Co-founded Unusual Ventures, now managing over $1 billion. 

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