Investors chase Nutanix founder and engineer’s do-it-again DevRev dream – Blocks and Files

Investors chase Nutanix founder and engineer’s do-it-again DevRev dream – Blocks and Files

VCs and angel investors are ploughing $100 million into two Nutanix veterans’ vision of a cloud-based platform for customer support and software development, valuing it at $1.15 billion.

Nutanix founding CEO Dheeraj Pandey and former SVP engineering, Manoj Agarwal, launched DevRev in 2020 and raised $50 million in seed funding the following year. DevRev refers to Developer (to) Revenue, and it is selling business infrastructure services that a startup can use to grow their operations without having to set up their own in-house operation for these back-office and front-office functions.

Dheeraj Pandey

Pandey said in a statement: “Design will play a key role in building trust with end users, who have inevitably begun to witness the AI hype cycle of broken prototypes and bespoke one-off GPT wrappers that are inherently unmaintainable and not secure.

“Trust is built by delivering fast, accurate, and personalized AI solutions. In under four years we’ve built an amazing multi-region platform to deliver enterprise-level security, combined with an experience that is consumer-grade.”

DevRev says its AgentOS combines “customer support, product management, and software development into a single integrated platform, creating a central knowledge graph for an enterprise. That knowledge graph powers a team of AI agents that automate workflows across every department.”

The pitch is that it will operationalize GenAI in the enterprise with one-click data migration from legacy systems and lightweight AI agents. The claim is that “DevRev’s simplified stack can co-exist or replace solutions such as Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Intercom, and Atlassian Jira.”

DevRev claims it has more than 1,000 customers, some with multi-million dollar deployments, including SaaS unicorns such as Uniphore, the largest AI chip designers and one of the world’s top 5 consumer banks.

Although this latest funding round is classed as a Series A round event, it actually includes investments accumulated over the past three years, culminating in its $1.15. billion valuation. Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Dheeraj Pandey’s family office, Param Hansa Values, plus several accelerators and family offices of tech CEOs and VCs, are amongst the investors.

DevRev customer ticket screenshot

DevRev says that operationalizing GenAI in companies will require a “robust knowledge graph, one in which data from legacy systems is continuously being fed in real-time to an interlinked network of customer, product, employee, work, user, and session records that capture complex business relationships.”

It says that, without product and customer labeling, it is almost impossible to implement AI that is meaningful and reductive. This is why there is a need for an enterprise knowledge graph. DevRev’s model-based agents are powered by custom vector embeddings that cluster, classify, deflect, deduplicate, route, attribute and generate omnichannel conversations, tickets, incidents, issues, articles, recordings, code commits, release notes, and more. 

There’s also “the AgentOS marketplace [which] has become a mecca for low-code snap-ins such as knowledge graph connectors, search crawlers, workflow nodes, and data visualization widgets that make AI achievable and delightfully simple for the younger generation and equally for the pre-GPT workforce.” 

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said: “AI will transform enterprise customer support and product teams, changing the way companies do business globally. Having backed Dheeraj at Nutanix, and now at DevRev, he is one of the few people in the industry who can leverage foundation models and weave them together with enterprise architectures, customer collaboration, and monetization.”

Read more about the DevRev story here.

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https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/08/12/investors-chase-nutanix-founders-do-it-again-devrev-dream/