Before He Fixed the Intranet, He Served the SF Giants
In 2007, Dhiraj Sharma did what many engineers in the Bay Area dream about: he started a company. Simplion Technologies was an IT consulting firm, unglamorous by Silicon Valley standards, but effective. Over eight years, it completed more than 400 client engagements - Cisco, Canon, NetApp, NVIDIA, and yes, the San Francisco Giants among them. Sharma learned, engagement by engagement, what organizations actually needed from technology. Not flash. Not features. Reliability, communication, and a system that works for the people using it.
By 2014, he had a clearer diagnosis of enterprise dysfunction than most product teams ever develop. Corporate intranets were architecturally broken. They were built for broadcast, not conversation. They stored documents nobody could find and pushed announcements nobody read. Sharma co-founded Simpplr in December 2014 with Piyush Rajput and Andrew Nelson, not as a consulting pivot, but as a thesis: that the employee experience deserved the same product rigor applied to customer experience. That employees, like customers, deserved software designed around them.
He ran both Lirik Inc. - a cloud-native software firm he founded in 2015 - and Simpplr simultaneously for several years. Eventually, Simpplr's traction made the choice obvious. By 2018, he was all-in.
Everyone deserved a better experience at work.
- Dhiraj Sharma, on why he founded SimpplrWhat followed was a decade of deliberate building. Not growth-hacked acquisition funnels or viral product loops, but the slow accumulation of enterprise credibility: case studies, analyst relationships, customer renewals, and a product roadmap anchored to actual workplace problems. Simpplr closed its Series A in 2016. The 2021 Series C - $32 million led by Tola Capital, with Salesforce Ventures and Norwest participating - announced that the intranet market was consolidating around a new kind of player. The 2023 Series D, $70 million led by Sapphire Ventures, confirmed that Sharma's bet had found its moment.
That moment is AI. Not AI as a chatbot bolted onto a sidebar, but AI woven into the connective tissue of work itself. Simpplr acquired Socrates.ai in 2024, launched Enterprise Search that same year, and in 2025 shipped EX Agent - a conversational interface that lets employees interact with their workplace the way they interact with a knowledgeable colleague. The AI Agent Studio followed: a low-code environment for building custom agents and workflows on top of the platform. Sharma describes the philosophy simply: "taking the essence of human interaction and addressing real challenges."
On Simpplr's tenth anniversary in October 2024, he reflected: "It feels like a one-year-old startup - that's how much energy and momentum we have right now." That is either the most compelling pitch imaginable or a subtle warning about the pace of change in enterprise software. Probably both.