The Origin
The Weekend That Changed Enterprise Software
In July 2019, Anish Dhar rented an Airbnb. With him: two friends, one from Twilio, one from LendUp, and one shared problem they couldn't shake. They had 48 hours. No agenda. No deck for investors. Just a whiteboard, a bad microservices war story, and the nagging certainty that every engineering team on the planet had the same mess hiding inside their infra.
Dhar had spent nearly five years at Uber - joining straight out of college, working on Uber Eats and the Jump bikes-and-scooters platform. Uber was a case study in microservices done at speed and then left to mutate on their own. Engineers gave services names from their favorite video games. Documentation lived in four different tools, or nowhere at all. When someone quit, the knowledge went with them. When something broke at 2am, finding out who owned the broken thing was its own incident.
"Engineers would name internal services after video games, and documentation was scattered across multiple tools, which made it difficult to gain context."
- Anish DharThe problem was not Uber-specific. Dhar talked to engineering leaders at company after company - startups, scale-ups, enterprises - and heard the same story back. Nobody had a good answer. Nobody had even tried to make a product out of it. That Airbnb weekend ended with a working prototype and a name: Cortex. By October 2019, Dhar had left Uber to build it full-time.
Three months later, Cortex was in Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. Dhar then walked into Sequoia's offices - the most oversubscribed venture fund on earth - and walked out with a seed check. Revenue at the time: zero. Paying customers: two or three, and not really paying.
| Founded | 2019 |
| YC Batch | Winter 2020 |
| HQ | San Francisco, CA |
| Before Cortex | Uber (~5 yrs) |
| Twitter / X | @dharosaurus |
| Based in | New York |
| Grew up | Bay Area, CA |