Profile / Founder File No. 047
Raviteja Dodda
The IIT Kharagpur engineer who watched his own startup drown in unactionable data, then built the platform 1,200 consumer brands now run on.
Raviteja Dodda // Photo: MoEngage
The IIT Kharagpur engineer who watched his own startup drown in unactionable data, then built the platform 1,200 consumer brands now run on.
Raviteja Dodda runs MoEngage from a desk in San Francisco, eight time zones from where the company was incorporated. In November 2025 he signed a $100M Series F led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives and A91 Partners. Six weeks later, in mid-December, the same investors plus ChrysCapital wired another $180M into the round. Most founders would call that a year. He treated it as a Tuesday.
The pitch in those rooms was not about ad spend or CRMs. It was about Merlin AI, the suite of agents MoEngage now ships to marketing teams at consumer brands. Offer agents. Campaign decisioning agents. The kind of software a CMO used to need a forty-person growth team to approximate.
Ravi - the name his investors and engineers actually use - does not look the part of the bombastic SaaS CEO. He posts infrequently. He still answers calls from customers. He has had the same co-founder, Yashwanth Kumar, since 2011. They were classmates at IIT Kharagpur in the late 2000s, the kind of dorm-mates who built SMS marketing experiments because the campus had cheap bulk SMS gateways and free time.
Before MoEngage, there was DelightCircle. In 2011, fresh out of Cisco and a Google Summer of Code stretch, Ravi and Yashwanth started Pipal Tech Ventures and shipped a mobile-first local offers and coupons app. India was barely on smartphones. They got users. They could not keep them.
The thing that broke them is the thing that built them. Their analytics dashboards lit up with charts about churn and drop-offs, but the dashboards never told them what to do. They had insight without instruction. The gap between knowing and acting became a thesis. In 2014, they wound DelightCircle down and started MoEngage to solve their own old problem for somebody else.
MoEngage grew up during the smartphone decade and survived the platform consolidations that ate most of its 2014 peers. The product started as a mobile push notification tool. It became an analytics engine. Then a cross-channel engagement platform. Then an AI engine called Sherpa. Then Merlin, the agentic version of the same idea, built for a generation of marketers who would rather brief an agent than open a campaign builder.
Along the way the awards arrived without being chased. Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in Enterprise Tech, 2016. BW Disrupt 40 Under 40 in 2018. Bloomberg started maintaining an executive profile page. Crunchbase began tracking him as a serial founder rather than a first-timer. The Indian SaaS press, which loves a redemption narrative, finally had one that did not require redemption - just patience.
The temptation with a CEO of an 800-person, eleven-year-old SaaS company is to assume he reads dashboards. By his own account, the work is closer to translation. He moves between the engineers who built Merlin, the GTM teams in San Francisco, London, and Bengaluru, the marketers who pay MoEngage, and the boards that now include Goldman Sachs partners.
The trick, in his telling, is to never lose the customer end of that chain. MoEngage has more than 1,200 of them, including some of the biggest consumer brands across financial services, travel, retail, media, and food and beverage. North America now makes up more than 30% of revenue, a number he set out to grow when he relocated to San Francisco. The other 70% is the global footprint that built the company in the first place.
Most enterprise SaaS companies bolted "AI" onto an existing roadmap in 2023 and called it a year. MoEngage rebuilt the experience around it. Merlin is not a chatbot in the corner of a dashboard. It is a layer of agents that pick offers, structure campaigns, and route messages on behalf of marketers who used to spend weeks doing the same work. The Series F money is largely going there - more agents, more decisioning, more languages, more channels.
Ravi has been careful in interviews not to oversell it. He calls Merlin a teammate, not a replacement. He talks about marketers eliminating guesswork rather than eliminating themselves. The framing is unusually grounded for a category that is otherwise marinating in hype.
Eleven years in, his co-founder is still the same person he was building SMS hacks with in a Kharagpur dorm. His advisors include the kind of operators who run multi-billion-dollar SaaS companies. He still answers, in his interviews, with the same line he has been giving since 2016: focus on customers, they are your biggest source of growth and learning.
It is the sort of sentence that looks small on a slide. It also happens to be the sentence that funded the company twice in one quarter.
The roadmap, according to the press releases that surrounded the Series F: more aggressive expansion into North America and EMEA, more Merlin agents in production, and continued investment in the data infrastructure that lets a B2C brand send a personalized message at the moment it actually matters. The unspoken roadmap, in the background: an eventual public listing, an outcome that the size of the Series F implicitly underwrites.
Ravi has not put a date on any of this. He has been building for fifteen years. He does not seem to be in a hurry.
Ravi and his MoEngage co-founder Yashwanth Kumar started experimenting with SMS marketing while still IIT Kharagpur undergrads. The campus had cheap bulk SMS. They had time. The seed was planted long before the company existed.
His X profile is @raviteja2007. He signed up in March 2009, before MoEngage, before DelightCircle, before Cisco even hired him. He has been online for the entire arc of his career.
Two companies. One college classmate. Yashwanth Kumar is still MoEngage's CTO. Founder-CTO pairs that last a decade plus are statistically rare; this one started in an undergrad CSE batch.
Goldman Sachs has now written three checks into MoEngage: 2022, November 2025, and December 2025. The last two were essentially back-to-back, an unusual signal in Indian SaaS.
His LinkedIn vanity URL is /in/rteja - the kind of short name LinkedIn only let you claim if you got there early. He did.