Former Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey Explains Latest Venture, DevRev

Nutanix co-founder Dheeraj Pandey retired as CEO two years ago, but now his newest venture, DevRev, is attracting attention. Pandey showcased his latest startup at this week’s Disruptive Innovators Inaugural CIO Winter Forum in New York.

DevRev’s Dheeraj Pandey

Pandey, who has said Nutanix reached $1 billion in annual revenue faster than any software company, is now DevRev’s CEO. Since starting DevRev, the company has raised $70 million in seed funding. DevRev recently began shipping its first offering, Developer Customer Relationship Management (DevCRM).

DevCRM integrates customer support chat and tickets from different channels and data platforms using APIs and webhooks. Described as an API-based, developer-focused CRM solution, it provides bidirectional data synchronization from disparate SaaS offerings.

Integration, Not Disruption

“I don’t like the word disruption,” Pandey told attendees at the conference in reference to how VCs describe the DevCRM platform. “The real word is integration.”

The company designed DevCRM to enable the sharing of conversations from various platforms, including Salesforce, Oracle and ServiceNow. Customer support systems that increasingly aggregate chat and conversations from disparate systems need to integrate larger amounts of data. According to Pandey, the challenge is assigning meaning and context to all this data.

“A lot of this stuff can be automated, integrated and consolidated,” Pandey said. “You don’t need five different systems for this.”

DevRev’s Madhukar Kumar

Among those who followed Pandey from Nutanix to DevRev was Madhukar Kumar, the company’s head of growth. Kumar demonstrated DevRevCRM at the Disruptive Innovators conference.

“When we look at what’s happening in the CRM world, Salesforce was supposed to solve the customer 360 problem,” Kumar said. “And that’s [why] they acquired Slack. And then, they talked about making Slack the operating system of an organization. But now your customer identity is in a bunch of different places. Even when you look at a CRM system, today, it is a database of contacts, opportunities and accounts.”

Bringing Context to Data

Kumar said what’s missing is context.

“Salesforce will tell you to buy these 10 other things, and that will connect you to your support system, or five other things, and that will connect you to your service. Or it might connect you to Jira, but there is no one view of your customer from an event perspective.”

What DevRev aims to provide, he added, is “product-led support,” noting companies such as Lyft, Tesla and Uber give that. For instance, when ordering a ride on Lyft, if one were to pay for a premium ride, but it didn’t show up in time, it would automatically correct the bill, he explained.

“They are now doing a lot more support with fewer people and a lot more automation,” Kumar said. “And the way they are able to do that is because the product is aware of the usage. And so they can connect it back to what has happened in your system in your code and then be able to push your stuff even before the user knows it.”