Palo Alto, CA-based DevRev, an AI-native platform that unifies customer support and product development, has snapped $100.8 million in Series A funding. This round brings its valuation to $1.15 billion, making it a unicorn. The round was led by Khosla Ventures (which recently invested in Waabi and Vayu Robotics), Mayfield Fund, and Dheeraj Pandey’s family office, Param Hansa Values, in addition to several accelerators and family offices of tech CEOs and VCs.
The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts.
“AI will transform enterprise customer support and product teams, changing the way companies do business globally,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “Having backed Dheeraj at Nutanix, and now at DevRev, he is one of the few people in the industry who can leverage foundation models and weave them together with enterprise architectures, customer collaboration, and monetisation.”
“We take a people-first approach to investing and we’re particularly proud to back DevRev because Dheeraj and Manoj understand that company building is a team sport. It’s also a strong example of the cognition-as-a-service (CaaS) era of technology Mayfield is bullish on,” said Navin Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield Fund. “DevRev is creating a high-speed highway between the customer and the developer. The layering of an AI teammate experience is an exciting next step that will allow developers, product managers, and customer support engineers to collaborate in real-time with end users.”
What change does it bring?
In the past, customer bots were rule-based and fragile, customer support CRMs were ticket-centric (and not conversational), and product development software was code- and project-centric (and not customer and product). Without product and customer labeling, it is almost impossible to implement AI that is meaningful and reductive, hence the need for an enterprise knowledge graph.
Realising this, DevRev’s model-based agents are powered by custom vector embeddings that cluster, classify, deflect, deduplicate, route, attribute, and generate omnichannel conversations, tickets, incidents, issues, articles, recordings, code commits, release notes, and more.
What does the company do?
DevRev was founded in 2020 by Dheeraj Pandey, who was previously the co-founder and CEO of Nutanix, and Manoj Agarwal, the former SVP of Engineering at Nutanix. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company has offices in seven global locations. Its mission is to help build the earth’s most customer-centric companies that are committed to essentialism.
The company’s knowledge graph is the data layer powering its AgentOS platform and apps. It creates three foundational layers such as airdropped data from legacy systems into a highly extensible customer and product graph, then powers search, analytics, and workflows, and AI-native apps for customer service, product management, and software engineering.
DevRev’s agents transform experiences for customer service staff, support engineers, product managers, and software developers by analysing structured and unstructured data like customer conversations, searches, and session analytics. This happens via lightweight surfaces such as search bars on websites, with just 7 lines of code.
Its simplified stack can co-exist or replace solutions such as Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Intercom, and Atlassian Jira.
“Design will play a key role in building trust with end users, who have inevitably begun to witness the AI hype cycle of broken prototypes and bespoke one-off GPT wrappers that are inherently unmaintainable and not secure”, said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of DevRev. “Trust is built by delivering fast, accurate, and personalised AI solutions. In under four years we’ve built an amazing multi-region platform to deliver enterprise-level security, combined with a consumer-grade experience.”
What do we think about DevRev?
The company’s AI-native approach, driven by an enterprise knowledge graph, enhances collaboration between customer-facing and development teams, making customer interactions more insightful and responsive. With its potential to replace or augment traditional CRMs like Zendesk and Salesforce, DevRev is set to significantly impact how companies build customer-centric products.
