DevRev Inc., a new startup led by former Nutanix Chief Executive Officer Dheeraj Pandey, today exited stealth mode with $50 million in initial funding.

The capital was provided by Mayfield Fund and Khosla Ventures, two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, as well as a number of unnamed investors that DevRev described as industry luminaries. The startup will use the funds to complete development of its first product, a software platform aimed at simplifying the work of application developers.

DevRev was established by CEO Pandey (pictured) and co-founder Manoj Agarwal, who created the startup after leaving Nutanix in late 2020. Pandey is one of Nutanix’s co-founders and was its CEO until last December. Agarwal was senior vice president of engineering at the company, a role in which he led product development initiatives.

Publicly traded Nutanix is a major provider of software for managing cloud environments. The company originally sold infrastructure appliances for on-premises data centers and raised more than $300 million from investors before listing on Nasdaq in 2015. 

As a public firm, Nutanix carried out a shift from selling infrastructure appliances to providing software products for enterprise hybrid cloud deployments. The company has developed a large software portfolio that includes products for tasks such as managing databases, backing up business information and orchestrating Kubernetes clusters. Nutanix posted revenues of $345 million last quarter, up 8.2% from the same time a year ago. 

Pandey and Agarwal founded DevRev to address a common challenge in software projects. The challenge is that the developers responsible for building a company’s applications often have limited visibility into how the company’s customers interact with those applications. This means engineering teams sometimes struggle to find out about technical issues that customers experience while using their software.

“Being product builders ourselves, Dheeraj and I have both felt the pain in leaving developers in the back-office,” Agarwal explained today. DevRev, the executive detailed, is building a “headless dev-centric CRM” that the startup hopes will “bring developers to the forefront of decision-making and real-time customer collaboration.” CRM is short for customer relationship platform, a type of software companies use to collect and organize customer information. 

Elaborating on the startup’s upcoming software platform, Pandey said in a statement that “by removing the bureaucracy between makers and consumers — with APIs, design, and an opinionated engagement model — we will empower devs to create customer-conscious products and businesses. That’s our mission: bring dev and rev together!”

DevRev has shared few other details about its upcoming platform and the product’s feature set. However, the startup did tell TechCrunch that the platform will include an application programming interface to let developers easily access customer data from their companies’ systems of record.

DevRev plans to launch the platform into general availability next year. The startup has assembled a workforce of more than 75 employees to support the development effort and plans to grow the team using the new $50 million funding round announced today. 

“Often the code, which developers end up writing or modifying, has little to no input on how customers use their product and its features,” Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla said in a statement. “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.”

Several other startups are also working to help application teams better understand the expectations and of the customers using their software. Each is taking a different approach to the task.

One of those startups is Productboard Inc., which raised $72 million in April. Productboard provides a platform that enables companies to aggregate feature requests from customers and identify the capabilities they should build first to meet customer demands better. Earlier, UserTesting Inc. closed a $100 million funding round to help companies gather customer feedback about ways to improve their digital products.

One likely reason for the strong investor interest in this segment is the sizable addressable market. Countless companies develop custom software in-house to help them gain an edge over the competition. Practically all of them can benefit from technology that could allow their engineers to align software development work more closely with customer requirements in order to deliver a better user experience. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE