Dheeraj Pandey - nicknamed ‘Atal’ by his cousins for his courage of conviction - grew up in Patna, Bihar, leaving at the age of 17 to complete his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) - Kanpur. At the age of 21, he moved to the United States, armed with $900 dollars in his pocket and a prodigious talent for math. He joined the University of Texas, in Austin, Texas, where he aimed to complete his PhD. Within a few years, he had quit his PhD, opting to work in the city for a year before moving to the Bay Area in San Francisco.
He set up shop in the Bay Area, building systems - large scale systems, distributed systems and data intensive systems for the next 25 years. During this period, Pandey founded Nutanix with Ajeet Singh and Mohit Aron in 2009 - a leader in cloud computing, offering software for virtualisation, Kubernetes, Database as a Service (DaaS) and much more. The company made its public debut in 2016, raising around $230 million, making it the largest VC-backed IPO in the United States in 2016. He continued to lead Nutanix for 5 years before leaving to start DevRev - an AI-native platform - in 2021.
