Dheeraj Pandey

Dheeraj Pandey is a Silicon Valley enterprise-software entrepreneur best known as the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Nutanix, the hyperconverged-infrastructure company he started in 2009 with Ajeet Singh and Mohit Aron. He led Nutanix through its September 2016 IPO on Nasdaq and continued as CEO until December 2020, building it into a multibillion-dollar enterprise cloud business. He completed his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur in 1997 — where he was named the best all-rounder of his graduating class — and went on to earn a master's in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was also a graduate fellow in the CS Ph.D. program.

Before founding Nutanix, Pandey held engineering roles at Trilogy Software and Zambeel, then spent years at Oracle Corporation in senior software-development roles working on Oracle's storage engine and Exadata. He subsequently served as Vice President of Engineering at Aster Data Systems (later acquired by Teradata), where he built and scaled the engineering organization and shipped multiple product releases.

In 2020, Pandey co-founded DevRev with Manoj Agarwal, former SVP of Engineering at Nutanix. DevRev is an AI-and-design-driven SaaS platform that unifies customer support, product management and software engineering ("dev" and "rev") on a shared knowledge graph. The company raised roughly $50M in seed funding (2021) and, in August 2024, a $100.8M Series A led by Khosla Ventures (with Mayfield, Param Hansa Values, U First Capital and others), reaching AI-unicorn status at a $1.15B valuation.

Alongside operating roles, Pandey sits on the board of Adobe and invests personally and through his family office, Param Hansa Values. In 2022 he made a $10M philanthropic gift to UT Austin for personalized-medicine research.

• Invests at the intersection of developer tooling, enterprise/infrastructure software, SaaS and AI — the domains where he has operated for two decades.
• Personal angel checks are small and early ($5K–$50K, sweet spot ~$25K), typically at the seed stage; far larger commitments come through Param Hansa Values, his family office, which co-invests in priority deals (including his own DevRev rounds).
• Backs technical founders building infrastructure/enterprise products, drawing on his own track record of building Nutanix and DevRev from zero.
• Geographically active across both the U.S. (Bay Area) and India, reflecting his networks in both ecosystems.
• No single published thesis statement; his stated worldview emphasizes founder resilience and "starting over" (his DevRev tagline: *"Starting over, one more time, with yet another trilogy!"*).