Jyoti Bansal’s rise reads like the rawest version of the American Dream: a young man who left Delhi with little more than a few hundred dollars and an engineering degree has built two multibillion-dollar companies and is now worth billions after his latest firm, Harness, closed a massive financing round. The new $240 million raise and $5.5 billion valuation didn’t come from charity — it came from markets and investors who respect talent, risk-taking, and tangible results.
Bansal’s story isn’t just motivational copy; it’s proof that capitalism works when allowed to work. He founded AppDynamics, scaled it to hundreds of millions in revenue, and sold it to Cisco in 2017 for roughly $3.7 billion, cashing out enough to give him the runway to build again — a reminder that reward follows risk and execution. That outcome should warm the hearts of any patriot who believes in private enterprise rather than government handouts.
What’s striking is how tight the system can be for talent trying to create jobs here: Bansal spent seven years on an H-1B visa and has publicly noted the irony that visa rules make it hard for those on H-1B to start companies and create American jobs. He later secured a green card and became a U.S. citizen in 2016, and only then could he fully unleash his entrepreneurial fire. Lawmakers on both sides ought to ask whether our immigration rules are helping or hobbling the job creators who keep America competitive.
Harness itself proves the point: it addresses the massive, tedious “after-code” work of testing, deployment, security, and compliance by using AI to automate what engineers used to slog through. Customers range from legacy giants to modern financial institutions, showing that American infrastructure and commerce increasingly depend on software — and on companies that can keep it reliable and secure. That’s the kind of innovation this country should be cheering and fostering, not strangling with red tape.
The funding facts are blunt and unmistakable: a $240 million Series E that includes a $200 million primary investment led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives and a roughly $40 million tender for employees, putting Harness at a $5.5 billion post-money valuation. Investors don’t hand out this kind of capital for hype; they invest where revenue, growth, and strategic vision line up — and that vote of confidence is a win for free enterprise.
Harness has now raised roughly $570 million in equity to date and is on track for a run-rate north of a quarter-billion dollars, employing over a thousand people globally with a meaningful engineering footprint in India and plans to hire aggressively there. That kind of scale is impressive, but it also raises hard questions for conservatives: we should applaud job creation while insisting that public policy encourage keeping more of those middle- and high-skilled jobs on American soil whenever possible. Global talent is a boon, but it shouldn’t become an excuse to hollow out domestic opportunities.
If conservatives mean what we say about merit and American exceptionalism, we should have a clear policy agenda that celebrates stories like Bansal’s: faster legal pathways for entrepreneurial immigrants, green-card policies that reward job-creation, and tax and regulatory settings that let startups scale and hire in the United States. That’s not open-borders populism or blind protectionism — it’s a commonsense, pro-worker, pro-growth stance that respects both sovereign borders and economic dynamism.
So let’s celebrate Jyoti Bansal not as an anomaly but as a design goal for national policy: an immigrant who embraced American opportunity, built valuable companies that employers and customers depend on, and proved that risk, talent, and hard work still pay off. If Republicans want to keep winning the argument for capitalism and patriotic governance, they should point to successes like this and push policies that make them more common — not rarer.
