DevRev, a customer relationship software firm, has raised $100.8 million in Series A funding. Khosla Ventures, among others, led the round. This investment surge reflects the growing interest in AI-powered companies.
With this latest round, DevRev’s valuation has hit $1.15 billion, making it a unicorn. The recent AI boom has driven venture capitalists to invest heavily in AI startups, anticipating significant returns from widespread adoption.
Investments in AI startups soared to $24 billion between April and June, more than doubling from the previous quarter, according to Crunchbase data.
As of 2024, 38 startups have surpassed a $1 billion valuation, with Elon Musk’s xAi leading at $24 billion, TechCrunch reports.
Founded in October 2020 by former Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey, DevRev provides AI-driven customer relationship software. The platform connects end users, sellers, support teams, product managers, and developers.
“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 personalized AI solutions. In under four years we’ve built an amazing multi-region platform to deliver enterprise-level security, combined with an experience that is consumer-grade.”
Khosla Ventures, which has supported DevRev since 2021, has also invested in notable companies like Instacart, DoorDash, and Stripe.
“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 monetization.”
“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.”