Five thousand tickets arrived the next morning. Aakrit Prasad’s recollection begins with a change to the user experience at AppDynamics, the application performance software company where he led core products. A decision inside the product had become thousands of questions outside it. Software has a habit of sending its reviews directly to the support desk.
He recalled the episode in a December 2025 conversation about enterprise AI. It is a useful entry into his career because it puts the customer’s experience beside the product executive’s intentions. A release can be complete from the team’s point of view while the customer’s work of understanding it has barely begun.
Prasad eventually co-founded AptEdge with Anthony Kilman, a fellow AppDynamics veteran. Their company works on a problem that sounds almost embarrassingly ordinary: helping support teams get the knowledge they need to answer customers. Ordinary, however, is an unreliable synonym for easy. Inside a software business, the answer may have acquired several addresses and forgotten to leave a forwarding notice.
An engineer learns where the questions go
Prasad’s professional background crosses the boundaries that a customer escalation often crosses. He worked as a senior staff software engineer at Salesforce, led application performance monitoring products at AppDynamics, and held product and strategy responsibilities at Applitools. His education includes a computer science degree from the University of Chicago. The sequence brings together writing software, deciding what it should do and working through its commercial consequences.
Application performance monitoring offers a particular education in consequences. Its subject is what applications actually do when people use them. The distance between intended behavior and observed behavior is the territory. Prasad’s later interest in the support desk sits comfortably beside that earlier work: both concern finding an explanation when a system behaves in ways somebody did not expect.
Colleagues have described specific habits from his AppDynamics years. AJ Jindal credited him with setting up regular conversations across product teams that otherwise worked on different things. Satish Talluri described work together on microservices strategy, packaging and pricing, and praised his balancing of immediate demands with longer-term product decisions. These are accounts of the connective work behind a product, where useful decisions require people to exchange what they know.
The point is less glamorous than a founder’s origin myth and rather more useful. Product knowledge travels through people, meetings, documents and decisions. A customer question can depend on several of them at once. Prasad had worked on enough sides of that arrangement to recognize the cost when the connections became slow.
The answer was scattered across the company
At AptEdge, Prasad and Kilman took on the fragmentation itself. A business might keep customer histories in one service, technical discussions in another, documentation somewhere else and engineering issues in a fourth. Each system can be perfectly respectable. Together they can make a support engineer feel like a detective whose witnesses have all moved offices.
The founders’ experience at AppDynamics supplied the operating context. Continual product updates created questions and escalations; knowledge existed across systems but could be hard to retrieve quickly. The same questions could travel inward repeatedly. Engineering and product teams then became part of the search party, even when an answer had already been recorded.
Prasad described AptEdge’s early approach as an intelligence layer connecting repositories of information and support systems. That foundation matters to the chronology. The company’s problem existed before the public rush toward generative AI. Language generation would add a capability to work already concerned with finding the right information.
Investors noticed how the founders worked through that problem. National Grid Partners’ Raghu Madabushi met them through introductions from Unusual Ventures and examined their approach to building a minimum viable product. His account emphasized listening to customers and translating feedback into product improvements. Stage 2 Capital likewise pointed to their ability to turn customer challenges into product decisions. Both were investors’ judgments, with the enthusiasm that relationship implies, but they described concrete operating behavior.
A new tool meets an old problem
Generative AI changed what could happen after retrieval. As Prasad put it: “Pre-generative AI, we couldn’t turn that answer into a response.” The distinction is small enough to disappear in a demonstration and large enough to change a workflow. Finding relevant material still leaves someone with the task of composing a useful reply.
In AptEdge’s approach, generative technology could help draft that reply for a support agent to review and edit. The engineer or agent would have something to work with beyond a collection of search results. There remained a practical obligation: the response had to fit the customer’s situation. Elegant sentences have limited value when they describe the wrong product behavior.
The answer may already exist. The work is getting it to the person who needs it.
The product question
In June 2023, AptEdge announced an $11 million seed+ round led by Stage 2 Capital, with participation from Unusual Ventures, National Grid Partners, Carya Venture Partners and Counterpart Ventures. Prasad was the company’s CEO. The announcement put fresh capital behind AnswerGPT, its answer engine for customer service, and the work of bringing company knowledge into the support workflow.
The financing arrived in an uneven venture market. Prasad described fundraising that year as difficult and observed how strongly investor interest had concentrated around generative AI. That makes the moment more interesting than a ceremonial funding photograph. AptEdge had an existing problem to solve, a new technical capability to use and a market suddenly eager to discuss that capability.
His circle of collaborators also included Bobby Napiltonia, an AptEdge adviser with experience at Salesforce and Twilio. The two appeared together in an August 2023 interview about customer service and AI. Prasad’s emphasis was getting accurate knowledge to service teams quickly. The technology was changing; the customer waiting for a useful answer remained recognizably the same.
The company keeps a scorecard
Prasad’s account of AptEdge’s 2024 progress supplied a more operational view of growth. He reported revenue rising elevenfold, monthly usage rising twenty-threefold and more than 175 million support issues analyzed. These were company-reported figures, without the underlying revenue or usage baselines. They describe the scale of change the team claimed, rather than supplying a complete set of business accounts.
He named businesses including Sumo Logic, Automox, Hexagon, Mimecast, Motive, Boomi and Trintech in that recap. He also shared customer feedback about gathering knowledge from multiple sources and handling version-specific questions. The details return the story to its starting point: product complexity becomes somebody’s question, and somebody else must work out which information applies.
Prasad has made a public argument for domain-specific AI in B2B support, drawing on conversations with customer experience executives and technology teams. His case favors depth in a particular operating environment. It is an understandable position for a product executive whose founding problem involved the details that generic answers can miss. A software version, release or configuration can change the usefulness of an otherwise plausible explanation.
Who gets the next opportunity?
There is another strand to his working life. Prasad has served in board and strategy roles with Advancing Women in Tech, a nonprofit focused on the leadership pipeline in technology. His LinkedIn profile dates his board and chief strategy officer service to 2017 through 2022. The organization’s team materials also identify his involvement.
AWIT works through workshops, advocacy and mentorship to help aspiring executives advance. Its account of its work includes helping more than 300 women obtain senior roles and promotions. That is an organizational result, rather than an achievement to assign to one board member. Prasad’s participation nevertheless places him in a setting concerned with who can gain access to leadership and the practical help required to get there.
His personal profile offers a few quieter details: an interest in technology and design, alongside travel, art, entrepreneurship and philanthropy. It identifies San Francisco as his home city. These interests give the professional record some breathing room without turning a brief public biography into an invented private life.
Back to the ticket
AptEdge’s leadership has evolved. Its current company biography identifies Kusal DeSilva as CEO and Prasad as founder, responsible for product vision and technology. The description puts him close to the product questions that recur throughout his career. In December 2025, the two appeared together with Thomas Lah on TECHtonic to discuss enterprise support and AI’s last mile.
The phrase suits the work. A system can retrieve information and produce language, yet the remaining distance to a resolved customer problem still requires context. Prasad’s career keeps returning to that distance: between engineering and product, between product and support, between a recorded explanation and a person who needs it now.
The morning of 5,000 tickets gives that ambition a human scale, even if the number is large. A product team made a change. Customers had questions. The queue registered the gap. Prasad went on to build a company around helping the people who have to close it.