From $20B Nutanix to AI Unicorn: How Dheeraj Pandey Built Two Generational Companies

Picture this: You're the CEO of a multi-billion dollar public company. You've spent eleven years building one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies in history. Then COVID hits, data centers lock down, and everything you predicted about cloud computing suddenly accelerates by five years.

What do you do? For most founders, the answer is simple: ride it out, collect the checks, maybe buy that yacht.

Dheeraj Pandey did something different. He walked away from Nutanix in December 2020 to build something entirely new in the emerging AI space. Four years later, DevRev raised $100.8 million in Series A funding at a $1.15 billion valuation, making it one of the fastest paths to unicorn status in enterprise software history.

Key Takeaways

• Dheeraj co-founded Nutanix in 2009 during the financial crisis and scaled it to nearly $2 billion in annual revenue before going public
• Nutanix pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), consolidating servers, storage, and networking into integrated appliances at a fraction of traditional costs
• The company achieved 90+ Net Promoter Score by building custom support systems instead of using Salesforce Service Cloud
• Dheeraj left Nutanix in December 2020 to co-found DevRev with former Nutanix SVP Manoj Agarwal
• DevRev's AgentOS platform combines AI agents with a knowledge graph architecture that unifies customer support, product development, and sales data
• After just over a year in market, DevRev was already trusted by over a thousand customers including SaaS unicorns and Top 5 global consumer banks

Table of Contents

1. The Problem: When Enterprise IT Became Too Complex
2. Dheeraj's Background: Ten Years Before Nutanix
3. The Birth of Nutanix: Cloud in a Box
4. Finding Product-Market Fit Through Virtual Desktops
5. Scaling to $2 Billion and Going Public
6. COVID Changes Everything: The Pivot Moment
7. Building DevRev: Converging Business Software
8. The Knowledge Graph Architecture That Changes Everything
9. Selling to Enterprise: Apps vs. Agents
10. The Philosophy of Product-Market Fit at Every Stage
11. Lessons for Technical Founders

The Problem: When Enterprise IT Became Too Complex

By 2009, enterprise data centers had become nightmarishly complex. Companies like EMC, NetApp, VMware, HP, Dell, IBM, and Cisco sold different proprietary systems for storage, networking, compute, and virtualization.

Setting up infrastructure meant coordinating purchases from multiple vendors, each with their own implementation teams, support contracts, and upgrade cycles. A single project could take months and cost millions of dollars before running a single application.

Meanwhile, something interesting was happening in consumer tech. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon were building massive-scale infrastructure using commodity hardware and software. They weren't buying expensive blade servers from HP. They were buying cheap servers and making them work together through clever software.

The question was obvious: Why couldn't enterprise customers do the same thing?

Dheeraj's Background: Ten Years Before Nutanix

Dheeraj Pandey graduated from IIT Kanpur where he was adjudged "Best All-Rounder Student Among All Graduating Students in All Disciplines". He moved to the United States in 1997 with just $900 and earned a master's degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.

His career trajectory focused relentlessly on large-scale data systems. He started at Trilogy as a software developer during the first dot-com boom, building clustered file servers. At Oracle, he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata and co-authored numerous patents in distributed databases.

Before founding Nutanix, Dheeraj was VP of Engineering at Aster Data (later acquired by Teradata), where he built distributed data warehouses—essentially a pre-Snowflake, on-premises version of modern cloud data warehouses.

The 2008 financial crisis hit while he was at Aster Data. Dheeraj, along with two colleagues he'd known for over a decade, were making the case that systems needed to embrace both SQL and NoSQL together. The company wasn't ready to make that bet.

So they quit to build their own company.

The Birth of Nutanix: Cloud in a Box

The founding team spent six months thinking about how to bring their strength—data management at scale—to a new product. They knew what skills they had and what values they wanted (reliability, scalability, availability), but they didn't know what product to build.

Then they discovered virtualization.

VMware was pioneering the ability to run multiple virtual machines on single physical hardware, essentially creating digital twins of servers in software. This was happening before AWS was publicly available.

Dheeraj saw this as the killer use case for their data platform expertise. But there was a critical piece missing: how to deliver it.

They made a bold decision to put their software into appliances—commodity servers that didn't traditionally get sold in enterprise markets. While enterprises bought expensive proprietary blade servers from HP, Dell, and IBM, Nutanix would use the same commodity hardware that Google and Facebook used.

The pitch was simple: private cloud capabilities with the economics of public cloud, delivered in compact appliances you could start small with and scale as you grew. They called it "cloud in a box."

Finding Product-Market Fit Through Virtual Desktops

Virtualization itself was a paradigm, not a use case. Nutanix needed to get even more specific about who they were solving problems for.

They found it in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

After the Snowden revelations, enterprises became paranoid about data security. There was a big push to virtualize Windows desktops so that no machines left the premises. Everything would run in the data center instead of on ten thousand individual desks.

This became Nutanix's killer initial use case. They could take an entire rack's worth of traditional infrastructure and compress it down to something compact and affordable. Companies loved that it was so integrated—everything in one box that you could start with for as little as $30,000 and scale to $3 million using the same system.

The idea of fractional consumption, which was getting popular with public clouds, was now available for private clouds.

Scaling to $2 Billion and Going Public

The company scaled from hundreds of requests per second to regularly handling peaks north of 1 million requests per second, managing about a million machines belonging to twenty thousand customers.

What set Nutanix apart wasn't just technology—it was obsession with customer experience.

They achieved a Net Promoter Score of 90+ for the longest time, which is extraordinary in enterprise software. How? They built their own custom support portal and telemetry systems instead of using Salesforce Service Cloud. They used Slack extensively with customers for real-time collaboration, treating customers as part of their team.

Support people, product managers, developers, sales engineers, and executives all learned together on customer Slack channels. This real-time, collaborative approach created incredibly strong relationships with even their largest customers.

Nutanix went public in 2016 and became one of the fastest companies to reach $1 billion in revenue. Dheeraj was recognized with multiple awards including Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015.

But by 2016-2017, questions were emerging about an even more invisible infrastructure: true cloud, where you don't own anything—you just rent it.

COVID Changes Everything: The Pivot Moment

By 2018, it was evident to Dheeraj that cloud consumption models were here to stay. Nutanix responded by going fully software-based, shrinking contracts from four-five years to one-year terms, and focusing on software subscriptions instead of hardware revenue.

But they were still fundamentally a private cloud company.

Then February 2020 happened. COVID hit. All data centers locked down except the emergency hyperscaler ones operated by AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

Every enterprise that had been postponing cloud migration suddenly had no choice. They needed to burst into public clouds immediately.

For Dheeraj, this was a moment of clarity. The thing he'd observed for ten years—public cloud—was now touching enterprises in a massive way. His entire personal wealth was tied to an on-premises stock.

He spent the rest of 2020 figuring out how to become an investor in Nutanix while operating something new in the cloud-native world.

Building DevRev: Converging Business Software

The inspiration for DevRev came directly from running Nutanix at scale.

At nearly $2 billion in annual revenue, eighty percent gross margins, twenty thousand customers, and thirty thousand sites, Nutanix had done an amazing job with customer support. They had great telemetry, great analytics, great real-time collaboration through Slack.

But they hadn't used Salesforce Service Cloud to front-end customers. They'd built their own systems because existing tools weren't good enough.

The insight was simple: if Nutanix struggled with business software despite being a sophisticated technical company, every company must be struggling.

Dheeraj started thinking about convergence. The biggest revolutions—iOS, AWS—were integrative. They consolidated many separate things into unified experiences.

DevRev was founded in October 2020 by Dheeraj Pandey and Manoj Agarwal, formerly SVP of Engineering at Nutanix. The thesis was to converge business software by recognizing a fundamental pattern:

Most SaaS tools are work management tools with different names. Work for sales is called opportunities. Work for marketing is called campaigns. Work for support is called tickets. Work for operations is called incidents. Work for developers is called issues.

They all have states, stages, constraints, automation, customization. They're all essentially the same underneath.

The Knowledge Graph Architecture That Changes Everything

DevRev's architecture centers on a knowledge graph that maps work, identity (who's working), and parts (what you're working on—products or services) as the canonical representation of a company.

This knowledge graph is "reskinnable"—you can call the same underlying object an opportunity, a ticket, an incident, or an issue depending on the department using it.

On top of this knowledge graph sits common middleware: search, analytics, and workflows. These engines work across all departments rather than being siloed.

Pre-GPT, DevRev was building three apps on this foundation:

• Support: Customer service software
• Build: Software development tools (replacing JIRA)
• Grow: Sales CRM

Each app had its own interface for different personas, but they shared the exact same infrastructure. The leverage was immense—one engineering team could build features that worked across all three use cases.

Then ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

Dheeraj realized something profound: agents could sit on top of this same infrastructure. DevRev now has three agents—customer experience, developer experience, and sales experience—all sharing the exact same trunk of knowledge graph, search, analytics, and workflows.

The platform became even more powerful because the agents could reason across the entire business, not just one department's silo.

Selling to Enterprise: Apps vs. Agents

DevRev's go-to-market strategy differs between mid-market and large enterprise. In mid-market, they replace tools like Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud with their AI-native apps and agents. In large enterprises, agents sit alongside existing Salesforce, JIRA, and other legacy systems.

This is similar to how public clouds initially said: "Come build new apps on us. You can always lift and shift the old stuff later."

DevRev's customer experience agent delivers dramatically better results than incumbents. Dheeraj shared the example of a large payment software company spending $30-40 million on support with $18 cost per ticket.

They were struggling with Salesforce's Agent Force, achieving only 13% deflection rates for L1 support (simple search queries), with 10% of those being abandoned sessions where customers gave up in frustration.

After implementing DevRev's customer experience agent, the company achieved 86% resolution rates.

The Philosophy of Product-Market Fit at Every Stage

When asked when he felt Nutanix had found product-market fit, Dheeraj's answer was surprising:

"You have to figure out PMF at every number. Even at a billion, you have to say, do I have a PMF for two billion? And you might not. You might say, look, I'm done. My growth is now two percent, and I just need to reap the renewals. So I wouldn't think that PMF is ever a destination."

His framework is net dollar-based expansion. If your net dollar-based expansion is upwards of 125-130%, you're in good company. This means at least 30-50% of your current quarter's business should come from existing customers, not new logos.

The key insight: Don't sell and run. Sell and stay.

"A lot of founders are very good at selling and going to the next account, and selling, and going to the next account. I think from promise to reality is actually journey. It's just like marriage. You date and you think your wedding is basically the last thing you care for. The real stuff happens after the wedding."

Get your existing customers to pay more with you. That's the only way to really achieve product-market fit.

Lessons for Technical Founders

1. Platform thinking from day one—but start with a use case

Dheeraj emphasized that while Nutanix had platform ambitions from the beginning, they started with virtual desktops as a specific use case. "A use case is a focus, but unless you can make a few billion dollars on your own, you can't acquire your way into becoming a public company over time."

The trick is knowing what's common platform infrastructure versus what's specialized for specific use cases. At DevRev, workflows, search, and SQL engines are platform. Specific UI components like Kanban boards work across opportunities, tickets, and issues—also platform.

This requires sophisticated architectural thinking and slows you down about 20%. But you can run really fast later.

2. Design matters more than engineers think

At Nutanix, Dheeraj spent countless hours thinking about "invisible infrastructure"—making complex systems simple and removing the need for specialists. He applied the same thinking at DevRev.

The lesson came from Apple and AWS: both removed gadgets and left-shifted complexity. They made back-end operations seem invisible through great design. Nutanix did this for data centers. DevRev is doing it for business software.

3. Find commonality before differences

"Most people in the world, they're like, no, no, but it's different. But you don't realize that the hardest thing to say is eighty percent is common. Find commonality before you find differences."

This is how you achieve leverage. By recognizing that opportunities, tickets, incidents, and issues are fundamentally the same type of object with different labels, DevRev can build once and deploy everywhere.

4. Distribution model matters as much as product

Reflecting on Nutanix, Dheeraj admitted: "We had great content, great heart, a great soul with customer success and net promoter score. Great high quality products that we built amazing culture within the company. But we had a stale distribution model from the 1990s, which was appliance and hardware and channel."

At DevRev, he's solving this from the start with AI agents that can be deployed much more easily than traditional enterprise software implementations.

5. Build for the generalist, not just the specialist

Traditional enterprise software is built for people who spend eight hours a day in one tool. These specialist interfaces are complex, require long implementations, and are customized by partner ecosystems.

"I think we basically just made it so complex that no one could end up using it anymore, except for a few people who are stuck onto it for eight hours a day. I think we have to democratize business software and think about the casual user."

Natural language interfaces through AI agents make software accessible to casual users—the "rubber necker" or "window shopper" who needs occasional access.

6. Value relationships and work backwards from that

"At the end of the day, we look at what really lasts is relationships. I tell people that look, it's so much fun to do companies because you make lifelong friends and there's nothing more rewarding than the fact that you have lifelong relationships."

This philosophy drove Nutanix's incredible customer relationships and high NPS. It's embedded in DevRev's approach to treating customers as part of your team through real-time collaboration.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dheeraj Pandey?

Dheeraj Pandey is an Indian-born American businessman who co-founded Nutanix in 2009 and served as CEO until 2020. He currently serves as CEO of DevRev, which he co-founded with Manoj Agarwal in 2020. He also serves on the board of Adobe.

What is Nutanix and what does it do?

Nutanix pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which combines computing, storage devices, storage networking, and virtualization into common hardware controlled by software-defined processes. It's now a leader in hybrid cloud solutions.

How fast did Nutanix grow?

Nutanix was one of the fastest companies to reach $1 billion in revenue and went public in 2016. By the time Dheeraj left in 2020, the company was approaching $2 billion in annual revenue with 20,000 customers.

Why did Dheeraj leave Nutanix?

Dheeraj left Nutanix in December 2020 after realizing that COVID had accelerated the shift to public cloud and service-based consumption models in ways that would reshape enterprise IT. He wanted to build something native to this new world.

How much funding has DevRev raised?

DevRev raised $100.8 million in Series A funding in August 2024, achieving a $1.15 billion valuation. The round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Mayfield Fund and others.

What makes DevRev different from Salesforce or Zendesk?

DevRev's architecture is built on a common knowledge graph that unifies work, identity, and parts across all departments. This allows search, analytics, and workflows to work across customer support, product development, and sales rather than being siloed in separate tools.

What is DevRev's AgentOS?

AgentOS is DevRev's platform that combines AI agents with knowledge graphs to automate enterprise workflows. It offers one-click data migration from legacy systems and deploys lightweight AI agents that can reason across an organization's entire data landscape.

Want More Founder Stories Like This?

This article is based on an episode from The Product Market Fit Show, where host Pablo Srugo interviews successful founders about their journeys from zero to PMF and beyond.

Listen to the full conversation with Ben Alaire to hear more about the technical decisions behind RAG for legal research, competitive dynamics as horizontal AI improves, and why Ben thinks most legal AI startups will fail.

🎧 Listen to the episode here →