# Anish Dhar

> Anish Dhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Cortex, a San Francisco-based internal developer portal company he co-founded in 2019 after spending nearly five years as an engineer at Uber. Watching Uber's microservices sprawl into chaos—thousands of undocumented services named after video games, ownership lost every time someone quit—he rented an Airbnb for a weekend hackathon with two friends and built the first version of what would become a $470M company backed by Sequoia, Scale Venture Partners, IVP, and the Collison brothers. Cortex raised $60M in Series C funding in September 2024 and is used by engineering teams at Adobe, Grammarly, Xero, TripAdvisor, and Canva to catalog, score, and continuously improve their software services.

- **Role:** Cofounder & CEO at Cortex
- **Organizations:** Cortex, Y Combinator (W20), Uber, Divtera, Homeroom
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** High School Diploma, Lynbrook High School, Bachelor's degree (Computer Science or related), Unknown University
- **Known for:** Co-founded Cortex, valued at ~$470M as of 2024 Series C, Raised $112.78M in total funding across seed, Series B, and Series C, Secured Sequoia as seed investor with zero revenue

## Career timeline

- **2014-2016** — Co-founded Homeroom, a collaborative workflow software platform
- **2016** — Joined Uber as a software engineer after college
- **2016-2019** — Engineer at Uber, working on Uber Eats and Jump (bikes/scooters)
- **2018-2019** — Co-founded Divtera, a marketplace for home equity (nights/weekends side project)
- **July 2019** — Rented an Airbnb with two friends for a 48-hour hackathon; built first version of Cortex
- **October 2019** — Left Uber to pursue Cortex full-time
- **2019** — Founded Cortex with Ganesh Datta and Nikhil Unni
- **2020** — Accepted into Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch
- **2020** — Raised seed round from Sequoia with $0 revenue and 2-3 non-paying customers
- **2023** — Raised $35M Series B for Cortex
- **September 2024** — Raised $60M Series C led by Scale Venture Partners, valuing Cortex at ~$470M
- **October 2024** — Hosted IDPCON, the first in-person conference dedicated to internal developer portals, in New York City

## Achievements

- Co-founded Cortex, valued at ~$470M as of 2024 Series C
- Raised $112.78M in total funding across seed, Series B, and Series C
- Secured Sequoia as seed investor with zero revenue
- Backed by Patrick and John Collison (Stripe founders)
- Built Cortex into a platform used by Adobe, Grammarly, Xero, TripAdvisor, Canva, and 100+ enterprise customers
- Founded and hosted IDPCON 2024 with 300+ attendees in New York City
- Y Combinator Winter 2020 alumnus
- SOC Type 2 and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified company under his leadership

## Latest updates

- **2024-09** — Cortex raised $60M Series C led by Scale Venture Partners at a ~$470M valuation
- **2024-10** — Hosted IDPCON 2024 in New York City with 300+ attendees — the first major in-person conference for the internal developer portal category
- **2025-03** — Published article on Built In: 'AI Coding Assistants Can Be a Huge Help — Just Not Where You Might Think'

## Links

- Website: https://cortex.io
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anishdhar
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/dharosaurus

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/anish-dhar
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-27