Naresh Agarwal

Naresh Agarwal is a career engineering leader in enterprise software, cybersecurity, and observability, currently based in Bengaluru, India. Since March 2025 he has served as SVP & Head of Engineering for the Application Security business unit at Harness, where he leads development of an AI-based DevSecOps / "Code-to-Cloud" security platform aimed at Fortune 1000 enterprises. Harness acquired the API-security company Traceable in early 2025, and Agarwal joined Harness through that transition.

Immediately prior, Agarwal was SVP & Head of Engineering and head of the India R&D center at Traceable AI, an API-security startup co-founded by former AppDynamics executives (Jyoti Bansal, Sanjay Nagaraj, and others). There he helped build and scale Traceable's API security product from its launch through its growth years. Before Traceable, he was VP of Engineering and Head of India Research & Development at AppDynamics, the application-performance-monitoring company (acquired by Cisco in 2017), where he managed global R&D teams — the AppDynamics affiliation and the Munich (AppDynamics GmbH) contact details in the stub data trace back to this period. His earlier career includes engineering roles associated with data-software company Informatica.

According to his professional profiles, Agarwal holds B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. Alongside his operating roles he is active as an angel investor and mentor to early-stage startups and incubators across the US and India, focused on the enterprise-software and security domains he has worked in throughout his career.

• Invests primarily at the seed stage as an individual angel, not through a managed fund.
• Backs companies in his areas of deep operating expertise: application & data security, API security, developer/DevSecOps tooling, and monitoring/observability infrastructure — sectors that mirror his work at AppDynamics, Traceable, and Harness.
• Geographic emphasis on India- and US-based startups, consistent with his role running India R&D centers and mentoring across both ecosystems.
• Adds value as a technical/engineering operator and mentor — likely favors founders building deep-tech enterprise products where his scaling experience (global R&D teams, security platforms) is directly relevant.
• (Public sources do not disclose a specific check size or a written thesis statement.)