Pramod Dabir had just earned a place in the U.S. Open. In August 2003, he and John Isner won the USTA Boys’ 18s doubles championship in Kalamazoo, Michigan, beating Gregory Ouellette and Eric Riley 6-1, 6-4. New York awaited. So did something with rather less television appeal: an exam related to Dabir’s electrical engineering studies at the University of Illinois.
Isner headed home to North Carolina. Dabir went back to campus. A Grand Slam invitation, it turned out, did not clear the academic calendar. He was delighted about the Open: “I’ve only been to the Open to watch.” Now he would enter as a player.
That small piece of scheduling tells you something useful about Dabir’s story. The conspicuous event gets the attention. The other obligation still needs doing. Years later, his career would include investment banking, a fashion startup, a software engineering business and private-market investing. Each new venture brought its own version of the exam.
The teammate with the warm-up soundtrack
At Illinois, Dabir belonged to the team that won the 2003 NCAA championship. He had arrived in a recruiting class with Ryler DeHeart and Rajeev Ram. By the time Dabir and DeHeart were seniors, they carried memories of that title into a team whose younger players had heard the stories.
His contribution had a volume setting. Teammates knew a player who cracked jokes and rapped along with the warm-up music at Atkins Tennis Center. DeHeart admired his ability to combine electrical engineering with varsity tennis. Ryan Rowe remembered the lesson Dabir gave him about being present for teammates. These are unusually useful details in a career otherwise easy to compress into titles.
By his final year, he had decided to pursue investment banking after graduation. Tennis had occupied his life since childhood, but the professional tour would not be his next destination. The degree mattered. So did the work habits required to finish it. His teammates were preparing for another season; Dabir was also preparing for a change of arena.
Goldman Sachs, then a house full of fashion advice
He joined Goldman Sachs in San Francisco and later worked at TA Associates, focusing on internet and software investments. Finance supplied an education in how businesses were valued, financed and sold. It also put him inside the machinery during an extraordinary turn in the economic cycle.
Dabir remembers the contrast at Goldman vividly. Early on, deals kept him working roughly 100 hours a week. He missed his sister’s high-school graduation despite being only about 45 minutes away. Then the financial crisis arrived and activity slowed sharply. In his recollection, the institution that had demanded so much time suddenly had far less work to distribute.
His first company would take him into a very different setting. In Palo Alto, living with his fiancée and other women, he watched people trade advice about clothes. A recommendation could change a buying decision. He saw an opportunity to give the person making that recommendation a share of the sale.
The result was Boutine, a fashion platform where users assembled virtual boutiques with products from emerging designers. Its proposition gave ordinary taste a commercial role: curate a collection, share it and earn commission when someone bought. A 2012 account described a catalog of more than 2,000 products from 80 designers. The business involved several moving parts before a customer even reached checkout.
Boutine eventually sold its technology. Dabir has described his first company as unsuccessful, while recognizing what it taught him. Both things can be true. A founder can dispose of an asset and still conclude that the business fell short of what he wanted to build.
The distinction is useful because the next venture did not require him to discard everything he had learned. He had experience working with engineers across borders, a product development process and people who had already worked together. The original customer proposition had fallen short. The ability to make software remained. That is a concrete inheritance for a new company, even when the old one has not produced the result its founder wanted.
The company inside the company
Boutine left him with something he could use: the team assembled to build it. In 2012, that team became the starting point for West Agile Labs. The new business offered software design and development to other companies. Its immediate proposition was easier to explain than the fashion marketplace: a client needed a product built, and the engineers could build it.
There is a pleasing lack of ceremony in Dabir’s account of the beginning. Four people did work, received payment and won referrals. More work required more people. The sequence gave the company a way to grow without first persuading a whole new marketplace to behave as imagined.
“Communications and process”
Pramod Dabir, on managing a distributed team
As the business expanded, the practical question changed. A founder could no longer keep every project in view by knowing everyone personally. Dabir’s answer emphasized reporting, transparency and a regular review of what was going well and what needed attention. Distributed work made those habits necessary. Distance leaves plenty of room for a misunderstanding to acquire a deadline.
West Agile Labs developed a presence in the United States, India and Poland. Its work crossed company sizes, from founders building an initial product to established enterprises. Dabir had moved from investing in software businesses to supplying the people and processes that helped software businesses operate.
At the tenth anniversary in 2022, he described a team of more than 350 serving over 40 clients worldwide. He also reflected on the relationships built along the way, thanking employees past and present. The anniversary numbers tell a growth story. His acknowledgment of the people behind them brings it back to the team.
When West Agile Labs became part of Veltris
On October 4, 2023, Trive Capital and BayLink Capital announced Veltris, formed by combining West Agile Labs with Wavelabs Technologies. Dabir became president. Wavelabs’ former chief executive, Mansoor Khan, became CEO. The company was headquartered in San Francisco.
The combination expanded the range of work available under one organization. West Agile brought digital product development, including SaaS products and platforms. The broader business covered data and artificial intelligence, engineering research and development, and software extending from hardware to applications. The phrase used for that range was chip to cloud.
For Dabir, it was a change in the structure around the business he had built. An engineering team that began with four people now belonged to a combined company backed by private equity. His founding-president role at Veltris sits at that particular turning point. It connects the West Agile Labs years to a larger organization, with shared leadership and a wider technical brief.
- 2003A national junior doubles title and a U.S. Open appearance with John Isner.
- 2012The Boutine engineering team becomes the foundation for West Agile Labs.
- 2023West Agile Labs and Wavelabs combine to form Veltris; Dabir becomes president.
A software business with laundry to do
Another part of Dabir’s career concerns an industry whose customers tend to arrive carrying bags. He co-founded Cents, which builds technology for laundromats and dry cleaners. The setting is practical: owners need to manage transactions, machines, staff and the movement of customers’ clothes.
Cents combines software, hardware and payments. That breadth makes sense in a business where the machine on the floor, the payment at the counter and the record in the system all belong to the same transaction. A working laundromat gives software a fairly direct performance review. The wash still has to get done.
On March 26, 2026, Cents announced a $140 million Series C led by Sumeru Equity Partners, with participation from Camber Creek. The financing is a milestone for a company Dabir helped start; CEO and co-founder Alex Jekowsky leads it. Keeping those roles clear matters in a story involving several founders and several businesses.
In July 2026, Cents acquired Insight Systems, adding business intelligence and reporting capabilities for garment-care operators. That development brings the narrative back to an operating concern familiar from West Agile Labs: making the work visible enough for someone to manage it.
Returning to the investor’s side of the table
Dabir’s current partner biography at Open Doors Partners brings the finance and company-building chapters together. The firm uses separate vehicles for individual private investments. Investors evaluate opportunities deal by deal. Its stated approach emphasizes access, structure and communication.
A February 2025 account of its operations described more than 250 investor-group members and over 20 special purpose vehicles. Those are dated operating figures, rather than a present-day promise of scale. They also show why the less glamorous business of administration becomes consequential: someone must organize investor information, capital calls and distributions.
The professional path has therefore brought Dabir back to finance with operating experience added. He has been responsible for a team doing client work, lived through the limits of an early product idea and participated in combining his company with another. Those experiences give specific context to his stated interest in durable investment platforms and sustained growth.
He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and son. Tennis remains part of how he explains his approach to setbacks, responsibility and patience. The vocabulary has changed from points to projects and investments, but the obligations still arrive together. In Kalamazoo, a trophy and a place in New York were followed by an exam in Illinois. The next thing required his attention, too.