Dheeraj
Pandey

Right now, somewhere in an enterprise, a support ticket is being created in Zendesk, a related bug has been sitting in Jira for three weeks, and a product manager has no idea the two are connected. Dheeraj Pandey built DevRev specifically for that moment - the gap between the company and its customers that nearly every software tool makes worse. DevRev's platform, and its flagship AI agent product called Computer, pulls CRM, support, developer workflows, and company knowledge into a single unified graph. Not a dashboard. An operating layer.

Since raising a $100.8 million Series A in August 2024 at a $1.15 billion valuation - with Khosla Ventures and Mayfield leading - DevRev has been expanding its Computer platform across India, the Netherlands, and across EMEA. The product's latest version added shared memory at individual, team, and organizational levels, a desktop app, Agent Studio for building custom AI agents, and multiplayer collaboration. The philosophy is captured in two words Pandey uses often: "work softer." Give AI real enterprise memory. Let it act. Trust the context.

Pandey sits on Adobe's board and keeps himself in Palo Alto, California, where DevRev's headquarters sits at 300 Hamilton Avenue - roughly the same zip code where he spent the last decade of the Nutanix chapter. The proximity to Silicon Valley is intentional. The re-entry into founder mode was too.

In 2009, in the middle of a global financial crisis, Pandey co-founded Nutanix with Ajeet Singh and Mohit Aron. The idea was simple and audacious: collapse the sprawling, expensive, fragmented world of data center infrastructure into software-defined hyperconverged systems. It was a direct challenge to the hardware establishment, and to Oracle, the company Pandey had just spent four and a half years learning storage engines at.

He spent six months before writing a line of code just thinking about the architecture. That deliberateness became a Pandey signature. Nutanix spent years building before it found its footing, and when it did, the growth was generational. The company filed for its Nasdaq IPO in September 2016. Ernst & Young had already named Pandey Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015. By the time the company's market cap peaked at over $18 billion, it had created more than a thousand employee-millionaires - a number Pandey mentions not with pride in the wealth creation, but with something closer to a sense of obligation paid forward.

What he talks about less often: he was rejected by every business school he applied to in 2006. Harvard, Wharton, Stanford - all said no. He went back to building instead. The companies he built after that rejection collectively exceeded the GDP of several nations he could have studied case studies about in those programs.

In December 2020, Pandey stepped down as Nutanix CEO. COVID had just accelerated cloud migration by five years. The infrastructure battle he had fought and largely won was settling into a new equilibrium. He had, by any measure, already won that chapter.

The thing he felt he hadn't figured out yet was distribution. "I wanted to understand distribution models better," he has said. "That meant starting uncomfortable." At Nutanix, he flew 250,000+ miles annually just to listen - to salespeople, customers, regional managers. He understood by then that the machine he'd built relied too much on his own presence in the feedback loop. DevRev was designed to fix that, for every company, not just his own.

He co-founded DevRev with Manoj Agarwal, a longtime collaborator. The founding thesis: enterprise software had fragmented into a labyrinth. Every team used different tools. CRM knew nothing about what engineering was building. Support knew nothing about what product had shipped. Developers were cut off from the customers their code was supposed to serve. DevRev would build the unifying layer - a knowledge graph that captured the full journey of both product and customer.

At Nutanix, Pandey installed four core values: hungry, humble, honest, heart. Four H's. Then, mid-flight, he added a fifth: happy. That one surprised observers more than any product launch. Enterprise software leaders don't usually add happiness to the org chart. Pandey's view was direct: if you can't maintain equanimity at work, you bring war home. If you bring war home, you return to work already depleted. The loop kills everything slowly.

He has said, more than once: "I was never angry at Nutanix." Not a claim to sainthood - a description of a practice. He traces the discipline to breath control, citing the same logic meditation teachers use: the most automatic behavior humans have is breathing. Control that, and you can control the reactive patterns underneath everything else.

He is an outspoken critic of hustle culture - "hustle porn" in his words - and he's been saying it since before it became fashionable to say it. His framework for sustainable entrepreneurship centers on what he calls the home-work loop: the quality of your spousal relationship and home life is the actual substrate on which professional resilience rests. Everything else is downstream of that.

Pandey describes the current moment in enterprise AI as a "Goldilocks moment" - a phrase he uses to mean the rare convergence of technology maturity, market demand, and AI capability that doesn't last long. DevRev's Computer platform is his wager on what the next phase of enterprise software actually looks like: not AI bolted onto legacy SaaS, but an AI-native layer that can access, reason through, and act across enterprise tools with full context and auditability.

The product has been expanding fast. Agent Studio, launched in early 2026, lets teams build, deploy, and govern custom AI agents at scale. Text2SQL analytical reasoning allows natural language queries against enterprise data. Shared memory - at individual, team, and org levels - means each AI session builds on previous work rather than starting blank. The early results are measurable: clients have reported 30% reductions in incident response times through DevRev's conversational search features.

In India, the March 2026 expansion marked DevRev moving enterprise AI from pilots to production deployments. In the Netherlands, the April 2026 Leadership Circle event was Pandey's public bet that Europe's enterprise AI adoption had hit its next phase. By mid-2026, the company was on track to scale from nine sales teams in EMEA to twenty-five.

Pandey's framing for all of it: "Work softer." The opposite of hustle. The same rule he applies to himself.