Stawan Kadepurkar bought a house at 25. His first car came at 29. In a technology founder’s biography, this is a pleasing reversal of the usual priorities: shelter before horsepower. It also places him in a particular moment in India, when an engineering degree was beginning to purchase a future that an earlier graduating class could scarcely take for granted.
He entered college in Pune in 1991 and graduated in 1995. At Siemens in Mumbai, he started as an electronics engineer. Two years later, he joined Infosys in Bangalore, helping its client Cisco develop software that carried telephone calls over the internet. His parents were teachers. His earnings at Infosys exceeded theirs combined.
Those early milestones belong to the story of India’s expanding technology economy. They also introduce a career spent working through the distance between a useful technical idea and a functioning business. Today Kadepurkar is co-founder and CEO of Provus, which makes software for pricing and quoting services. The subject sounds dry until somebody agrees to deliver twelve months of work for nine months of money.
A telephone call has to arrive somewhere
Before Kadepurkar was selling services, he was helping make software work. The second edition of Cisco CallManager Fundamentals, first printed in 2005, includes him among its technical reviewers. His biography describes an Infosys software development manager who had spent six years working on CallManager features and applications.
The description is unusually useful. It puts him alongside development, quality assurance, and technical support teams. A feature must be designed, tested, and supported after somebody uses it. Each group sees a different part of the same system. Much of his later work at Provus concerns another set of teams trying to share a sufficiently accurate picture.
His experience included building technology and working with the people responsible when it met the customer. Development decisions reached beyond the development team. That practical exposure preceded his move into commercial leadership.
From code to the commercial table
His subsequent roles took him into the business of engineering services. At Aricent, he led global sales for the HiTech vertical. At L&T Technology Services, his responsibilities included heading the HiTech business and serving as chief business officer. He also served on the board of Esencia Technologies, an LTTS subsidiary.
In 2018, he presented the Hi-Tech roadmap at LTTS’s investor and analyst day. The material covered a business moving through generations of communications technology and into areas including 5G, artificial intelligence, and security. Here was a different engineering problem: deciding where a services organization should build capability before demand arrived.
By January 2020, he was speaking as LTTS’s chief business officer about its participation in Qualcomm’s Smart Cities Accelerator Program. The initiative connected technology providers with municipalities and systems integrators. The practical concerns included energy use, traffic, and waste management. It was work with many participants, different constraints, and consequences beyond a successful demonstration.
That range matters to his next move. Quoting a service requires a view of the people, skills, timing, and dependencies behind it. An attractive price can conceal an impractical commitment. Someone who has worked across engineering and sales has had reason to encounter both halves of that sentence.
The spreadsheet acquires three founders
In 2021, Kadepurkar co-founded Provus with Mahesh Baxi and Ganesh Ramachandran. Baxi brought experience from Apttus, including professional services and customer success. Ramachandran had been its senior vice president of advanced technology. Kadepurkar brought the experience of selling services at large organizations. Their backgrounds met at the quotation.
The company announced $1.16 million in angel financing in May 2021. In July 2022, it announced a $12 million Series A led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Accel, Storm Ventures, and Firebolt Ventures. The stated purpose included expanding engineering, product, sales, and marketing.
Provus built its services configure, price, quote software on Salesforce. Its early capabilities included estimating rates, modeling staffing scenarios, collaboration, and routing approvals. That combination addressed a familiar inconvenience: a proposal might move quickly through sales while the assumptions underneath it moved separately through email.
A spreadsheet is an agreeable colleague. It will accept almost any assumption and rarely interrupts. Trouble begins when several departments each maintain their own agreeable colleague. Provus’s premise was that the negotiation inside the business needed a common working environment, with the consequences of a decision visible before the customer signed.
After the signature, the work starts
Kadepurkar initially held the chief revenue officer role. In March 2024, Provus appointed him chief customer officer, responsible for implementation, customer success, and technical support. The move extended his responsibilities into the period when the promises in a proposal become somebody’s working week.
Co-founder Baxi described his attention to customer needs when announcing the appointment. The praise had a specific operational counterpart: Kadepurkar would oversee the full post-signature customer journey. In a company selling coordination between sales and delivery, responsibility for what happens after a sale is a substantial part of the proposition.
By November 2025, he was publicly identified as Provus’s CEO and co-founder. Across those roles, the recurring subject was the continuity of a deal. Winning business, implementing software, and supporting a customer each place different demands on an organization. His progression gave him formal responsibility for more than the initial commercial handshake.
The expensive art of waiting
Kadepurkar’s diagnosis of sales friction is refreshingly unglamorous. He focuses on the delays inside an organization. He has described services quoting as a collaboration involving delivery, finance, operations, and sales, with information passing among people whose questions rarely arrive in a convenient sequence.
“The biggest slowdown in most sales cycles comes from waiting.”Stawan Kadepurkar · November 2025
His proposed use of AI begins with those pauses. It can assemble information ahead of an approval or draw on past deals to anticipate what a stakeholder will ask. He also emphasizes defined autonomy and human validation. The emphasis is on giving a system context and boundaries, then checking whether its assistance holds up.
- ScopeWhat is being promised?
- PriceWhat will it cost to deliver?
- AgreeDo the teams share the assumptions?
- DeliverDoes the plan survive execution?
There is a modest ambition inside that technical language: fewer people spending their day collecting the same answers. A proposal should carry enough institutional memory to be useful beyond the person who prepared it. Otherwise, a business can buy sophisticated software and still conduct its most consequential planning by asking who remembers the last project.
A deal needs a memory
By late 2025, Provus was working with Kantata to connect quoting and project execution. A February 2026 discussion brought Kadepurkar together with Kantata chief technology officer Vikas Nehru and TSIA’s Bo Di Muccio to examine how expected margins can erode between a sale and delivery.
Kadepurkar’s concerns included disconnected systems, limited historical information, and project expectations that change during execution. Linking the commercial plan to delivery gives the delivery team an earlier view of likely work. It can also bring information about past execution into the next estimate. The intention is a feedback loop that outlasts the sales meeting.
That is a useful test of his product thesis. A faster quote has limited appeal if it merely gets the wrong assumptions approved sooner. His attention to the handoff suggests a broader standard: the people who must perform the work should be able to recognize the deal they inherit.
When fewer hours change the price
In April 2026, Kadepurkar turned to a more awkward consequence of AI efficiency. If the same result takes less work, a services business must reconsider how it charges. “The move toward value-based pricing is accelerating,” he wrote. The commercial question follows directly from the technical improvement.
His argument is that selling an outcome requires defining that outcome, agreeing how to measure it, and understanding the economics of delivering it. Reducing hours changes staffing and forecasts as well as the quote. The appealing promise of greater productivity arrives with an accounting question attached.
He has also joined Thoughtworks revenue leader Chris Murphy in a webinar about services pricing in an agentic future. The discussion’s focus connects his current aspiration to his earlier experience: helping organizations translate changes in technology into workable commercial arrangements. The result still needs a scope, a price, and someone accountable for delivery.
Another kind of public service
Outside his executive work, Kadepurkar served on the Alameda County Library Foundation board. His board service ran from July 2017 to January 2025. He also volunteered with Scout Troop 153 from 2017 to 2023.
These commitments supply a quieter dimension to a biography otherwise populated by enterprise technology companies. The library foundation and a local Scout troop required time alongside a career that eventually included starting a company. The board service continued through Provus’s founding and its early years.
The house-before-car detail remains a good place to leave him. It gives a large economic story a human scale. Decades later, his chosen business is concerned with another ordinary object that carries considerable hope: a price written beside a promise. His work at Provus asks whether everybody involved understands what it will take to keep it.