Shahdol is a district in Madhya Pradesh that most people have never heard of. It had limited English-medium schools when Manish Jethani was growing up there, and the internet was more rumor than reality. What it had was one kid who studied hard enough to crack the IIT entrance exam - the first from Shahdol to do so. He enrolled at IIT Roorkee in 2003 and graduated in 2007 with a plan that lasted approximately until he walked out the gate.
"I figured out that I would not enjoy being in a very structured system," he later said. The high-paying corporate job that IIT was supposed to guarantee held zero appeal. Instead, he joined a small team in Hyderabad building what was essentially a Mozilla-inspired issue-tracking system for enterprises. He was a coder. He didn't talk to customers. He coded.
Then the money ran out.
What happened next defines how Jethani thinks. He could have found another engineering job. Instead, he picked up the phone and started calling enterprise clients - construction companies, mostly - pitching software that helped manage document workflows for large projects. His first deal: $500 for three months of work. By 2011, he was closing projects worth $250,000. The engineer who had never wanted to talk to anyone had become a serious enterprise sales professional. That transformation - from deep technical operator to someone who could read a customer's real problem - shows up in everything he's built since.
"I truly derive great joy in helping people make good decisions."- Manish Jethani, Hevo Data CEO
The SpoonJoy Chapter
In 2013, Jethani co-founded SpoonJoy with Sourabh Agarwal - an on-demand food delivery startup in India, when that market was still forming. Running a delivery operation meant obsessing over data: order rates, delivery windows, supplier inventory, customer behavior. Getting that data anywhere useful required engineers. Lots of them. The time it took to surface an insight often made the insight irrelevant.
SpoonJoy was acquired by Grofers in 2015. Jethani moved over as VP of Product Management, a well-funded, senior role at one of India's highest-profile startups. It was, by all external measures, a success. It was also quietly insufferable. "It was a very comfortable role, but that comfort was making me uncomfortable," he said. By 2017, he was ready to go back to zero.
The Actual Problem Worth Solving
But this time, the bar was higher. "I didn't want to do a startup for the sake of it. It has to be a problem that I truly and deeply care about. It was not about venture money. It was not about getting coverage on Forbes."
The problem he kept returning to was the one he'd lived at SpoonJoy: most people who need data to make decisions can't actually get to the data. Not because the data doesn't exist - it exists everywhere, sprawled across Salesforce, Shopify, MySQL, Stripe, 150 other places. The problem is the plumbing. Every connection between a data source and a warehouse requires engineering time, custom code, ongoing maintenance, and prayer that nothing breaks at 2am. Business teams waiting on those pipelines make decisions on instinct instead of information, which is exactly where companies go wrong.
Jethani and Agarwal co-founded Hevo Data in 2017 to remove that bottleneck entirely. The name itself nods to the phrase "heave ho" - the call to haul a heavy load. That's what Hevo does, automatically, for data.
"How do we as humans move away from intuition-based decision making to actually more fact and information-based decision making?"- Manish Jethani