Prabhav
Jain

Most people get one good call. They pick the right trend at the right time, ride it hard, and spend the rest of their career explaining how they did it. Prabhav Jain has made three bets and is working on his fourth. The difference between him and the people explaining themselves at conferences is that he was writing code at the same time.

In 2009, as a high school student at Torrey Pines in San Diego, he launched EasyDefine - a vocabulary lookup tool that sounds modest until you hear the number: 290,000 users across 185 countries before he even graduated from MIT. That is not a school project. That is a product. When he showed up in Cambridge in 2010, he already knew what product-market fit felt like.

At MIT he split his time between a computer science degree and a research position at the Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group - the kind of lab where the walls are covered in whiteboards and nobody talks about TAM. He also interned at Microsoft and placed in the top ten at HackMIT 2013 with a project called PillowPal. He graduated in 2013 with a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering and immediately co-founded his first real company.

EagerPanda came first. From 2013 to 2016, Prabhav built a knowledge-sharing platform as CTO alongside a co-founder who took the CEO seat. Greylock, Pear, and Venrock - not random angels, actual tier-one institutional investors - wrote checks. The company became a MassChallenge finalist. It did not become a household name, which is fine: most companies don't, and the investors knew the odds.

Then came CommonLounge. Starting in 2016, Prabhav switched seats - this time as CEO, not CTO - and built an e-learning community platform under the Compose Labs umbrella. The timing was good: the world was waking up to online education, Coursera was blowing up, and community-driven learning had not been done well yet. CommonLounge raised $2M from angel investors and built something that Brex decided it needed. In 2020, Brex acquired Compose Labs.

The acquisition is the quiet inflection point in this story. Prabhav did not cash out and go to Cabo. He stayed, took a tech lead role, and then kept climbing. Engineering Manager for Capital. Head of Engineering for Financial Services. General Manager of Web3. The man had founded and sold a company, and he spent the next four years becoming a more effective operator inside a billion-dollar fintech. That is not accidental.

Brex in 2020 was one of the fastest-growing startups in the country. Corporate cards, banking, expense management - the company had a clear thesis and, by the time Prabhav arrived, was scaling at a pace where the engineering org itself was a product you had to keep rebuilding. His Brex years (2020 to 2024) are a study in technical leadership at scale: four years, at least four distinct roles, and a track record of shipping things at rates people said were impossible.

He was also running a parallel track: as an a16z Scout since 2018, he had been writing angel checks into early-stage companies while operating full-time. By the time he left Brex, he had investments in 45+ companies. That is not a hobby. That is pattern recognition turned into capital deployment.

Prabhav joined 11x as CTO in August 2024. The company was already building something ambitious: AI digital workers that can autonomously prospect, research, reach out to, and qualify potential customers for enterprise sales teams. The thesis is that a well-trained AI worker can do the prospecting work of an SDR team at a fraction of the cost - and never needs to sleep, never asks for PTO, and never has a bad Tuesday.

As CTO, his first major project was a complete platform re-platforming - rebuilding the technical foundation underneath the product while the product was still running. The company's statement on his promotion to CEO noted "substantial improvements for our customers" as a direct result. Re-platforming is unglamorous work. It is also the kind of thing that either makes or breaks a growth-stage company when they need to scale.

Then in November 2024, a16z led a $50M Series B. Total funding reached $102M. The company now has roughly 150 employees and claims to serve hundreds of the world's leading go-to-market teams. In May 2025, founder Hasan Sukkar moved to a non-executive chairman role, and Prabhav stepped up to CEO.

The 11x product suite includes Alice - an AI SDR that claims a 3x higher response rate than human SDRs by pulling from 17+ data signal providers for deep prospect research - and Jordan, a multilingual voice agent that speaks 30 languages and follows up with leads at ten times the speed of a human. The company has also partnered with IBM to bring its digital workers into IBM's watsonx Orchestrate platform for global enterprise distribution.

What does it mean to start coding at fifteen and never really stop? In Prabhav's case it means that when he speaks about building technology, he is not describing something he manages or delegates. He is describing something he does. His personal website still shows the vocabulary tool he built in high school, the game he made for Windows 8, the AdmitSphere college advice platform he built as an MIT student (10,000+ users, featured on the MIT admissions blog). He does not appear to have removed any of it.

That kind of builder instinct is relatively rare in people who also end up in CEO chairs. It tends to make someone either a micromanager or an extremely effective technical leader - the difference usually comes down to whether they can hire people smarter than themselves and let those people run. Given that 11x went through a complete infrastructure overhaul while growing rapidly during Prabhav's CTO tenure, and given that he was then promoted to CEO by a board that had no obligation to pick him, the answer here seems clear.

He built Inkarus - a Windows 8 physics-based game that got thousands of downloads internally - because it was interesting. He placed in the top ten at HackMIT 2013 with a sleep-focused product called PillowPal. These are not things you put on a resume to impress people. They are things you do because you genuinely want to see if the thing works.

The CRM comparison is deliberate. Salesforce did not just build a database for contacts - it built the operating system for how companies track and manage revenue. When Prabhav says digital workers will be as important as the CRM, he is saying that 11x is not building a point tool that sits on top of your existing tech stack. He is saying it is the infrastructure layer.

The company has evolved, in his words, "from a single product, single use-case company to a platform that powers hundreds of the world's leading GTM teams." That language - platform, powers, world's leading - is not accidental. The company has moved from an interesting demo to something enterprise customers are running business-critical workflows on. The IBM partnership is a signal that the enterprise distribution play is real.

What comes next for Prabhav is running a company at a genuinely interesting inflection point: early enough that the competitive dynamics are still fluid, late enough that the technology has proven itself to paying customers. He has been an operator inside large companies, a founder building from scratch, and an investor watching the market from the outside. That combination of vantage points is not common in a first-time CEO.

He is also, still, writing code. Or at least that's the strong prior given everything else in his story.