Can Dheeraj Pandey's DevRev boost client revenues by linking developers to customers
Last week, DevRev, a Palo Alto, California based software start-up, raised $50 million in seed funding. The company’s digital platform allows developers to communicate and collaborate with customers in real-time, to help modify and improve products and services and, thereby, generate more revenues.
Due to bureaucratic layers in companies, software developers (dev) are isolated “from customers and revenue (rev)," Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.
A lot of developers start their working day by looking at a list of issues and bug fixes and thinking about which ones to tackle first. "Often the code, which developers end up writing or modifying, has little to no input on how customers use their product and its features," Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said in a statement. Khosla, 66, a billionaire venture capitalist who earned a degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon, and an MBA from Stanford School of Business, is a pioneer and senior statesman among Indian technologists in the U.S.
Khosla Ventures invested in DevRev’s seed round along with Mayfield Fund, led by Navin Chaddha, and Lightspeed Ventures, with Ravi Mhatre. Investors and advisers include Rajiv Bhatra, co-founder of security software firm Palo Alto Networks, Deepak Malhotra, professor, Harvard Business School, Manmeet Sandhu of PhonePe and Ajeet Singh, co-founder of ThoughtSpot. Altogether 12 IIT alumni have invested in DevRev’s seed funding round.
DevRev is currently testing and improving the platform by using it internally and by working with its design partners. All its operations are digital, using social platforms to recruit talent, generate ideas, and build a community around its product. The start-up is also getting input on its software from developers on Discord, GitHub and other online communities.
Dheeraj Pandey and Manoj Aggarwal co-founded DevRev last year after they both left Nutanix. Using automation, search, and the development of its nascent product, DevRev has hired more than 75 engineers and staff in Austin, Texas, Bangalore, Ljubljana (Slovenia), and the San Francisco Bay area.
In 2009, Dheeraj Pandey co-founded and was CEO of Nutanix, a cloud-computing company that sells operating system software, cloud services, software-defined storage, and virtualization software. San Jose, California based Nutanix, which went public in 2016, has a market value of $8 billion.
Pandey started his career in America as a software developer at Trilogy, a small company in Austin, in 1999. He took the job after earning an M.S. in computer science from the University of Texas, Austin and abandoning plans for a Ph.D.
He then moved to work for companies in the Silicon Valley, including Oracle, where he met his team of Nutanix co-founders. Pandey is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he met Manoj Agarwal.
Raised in a small village in the tribal hinterlands, Agarwal grew up without access to electricity, clean water, and no good schools. Through self-study, after leaving school at 12 to work for his father, Agarwal earned admission to IIT, where he learned to speak English more fluently.
Pandey expects an early version of the DevRev platform to be launched later this year, with the product available commercially in 2022. "Being product builders ourselves, Dheeraj and I have both felt the pain in leaving developers in the back-office," said DevRev co-founder Manoj Agarwal in a statement.
The goal of boosting client revenues by connecting developers to customers seems logical. But customers, many of whom may not have advanced computing skills, should find it easy to use DevRev’s software. Since the platform cannot be too technical, at least for customers, will it merely be a communication tool? If so, can the product be sold at high prices and generate large revenues and high profit margins when developers can perhaps use email to seek input from customers?
Also, the bureaucracy that exists in companies today, which keep developers in the back-office, is not going to disappear just because senior management is pushing the use of DevRev’s products. The bureaucracy was created to solve other problems and must continue to offer value to the chief executive or it would not exist, at least in the better managed companies.
More important, there is a reason why most developers are kept in the back-office and away from customers. While they may be very good in their coding skills, many developers do not understand, or have little interest in figuring out, how a business generates revenues. So, developers communicating directly with customers, and not through product managers, as at present, could result in delays, bottlenecks and other information technology system problems, resulting in loss of revenues for customers.
Evidently, Vinod Khosla and the other investors share Pandey’s optimism about DevRev growing into a major successful business. Their $50 million funding for DevRev is a large amount for a seed investment round for a start-up. In a post on the company’s website, Khosla says “DevRev’s bold, yet simple vision to bring developers closer to customers is one of those groundbreaking ideas we feel will impact every single company in the future."
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