Abhi Sharma, a second-time founder, successfully raised over $60M in venture funding for Relyance AI from top-tier investors.
Abhi Sharma, a second-time founder, successfully raised over $60M in venture funding for Relyance AI from top-tier investors. This episode delves into his strategies for building a category-defining platform and securing significant funding.
the most powerful technologies seem to blend in day-to-day life and you don't even notice it and that's when you know you have done it well. That idea really captivated and inspired me that like the fact that you don't have to be pompous about a technology because it just works which means it is done well and I love that idea of craftsmanship behind it. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we have a proven founder, a founder that has already done it. You know, he's now on his second business, you know, quite a rocket ship. And we're going to be diving into all the good stuff that we like to hear. you know, the building, the scaling, the financing, uh the exiting tool, and we're going to be talking about how they go about the conversion of privacy, uh data, security, and AI as well as uh fundraising. Also, they did it in the heart of the pandemic
as well as to uh not hiring an internal recruiting team fast enough. I mean, a lot of lessons learned, lessons that we're going to be hearing, you know, and and brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Abby Sharma. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Alejandra. So originally born and raised in the northern part of India. I know you moved quite a bit growing up too. So how was life growing up for you? Uh very typical uh Indian middle class, lower middle-ass family, although I would say I had beautiful views of the mountains back in India, snow covered. Uh I was very close to the Kashmir border. And then my uh father was an academic. So he moved around because of teaching and then eventually we lived a lot of time to in the western part of India. So if I were to summarize it was lots of love very low on economic
production but a lot of virtues and foundational values as I grew up in India and also you studied computer science you know so what got you to computers to begin with? So I was actually it was interesting enough I always thought as a kid that I wanted to be a doctor and that I kept telling my parents that's my ambition and then one day I had an uncle of mine he's like okay why don't you dissect this frog because it used to rain a lot where I lived and we had a lot of frogs and I was like holy no I'm not going to dissect a frog and then I realized actually I was fascinated with the idea of being a doctor I wasn't actually into it and so then early on as a kid I kind of like I was good at school. I was good at math and uh I kind of got interested into computers because I could build things and write some early apps and computers was still a fascinating thing when I was growing up. We were
quite poor so I got my computer quite late in in in in my kind of school career but like you jump on and you have dialup connection and you can connect to the world. So that captured my idea and then eventually after like a year of using computers for fun stuff I realized I wanted to build with it and headed in that direction. So in your case you ended up entering the startup um world and in fact that's the way that you got into the US. So walk us through that. So, I was always a little bit of uh probably not not a cool term to use, but sort of the black sheep of the family, very different, very unique. And I for some reason uh had this intention that I wanted to build something like whatever I was good at, I wanted to build it out and put it out into the world. And so, back then, I was actually pretty good at school. And the status quo in India back then when where I did my undergrad
was like well of course you have a great score you go work for Microsoft or IBM or Google and was cool and they paid well and I was like that is great but I am never going to be able to see the impact of what I do to a customer probably in that circle and I want to feel what it means to be at the edge build something and have a customer give me direct feedback. It like mattered to me a lot. So I ended up actually joining a very tiny startup back in India that uh when startups was not cool my parents were confused what is it what does it even mean to go to a startup and it was actually one of the founders that had moved back to India but most of the business was here so I joined them and I worked there for like six months and they were like oh this kid is smart let's ship him back to the US because they were entering a new market and I was good at the platform and I was I I enjoyed being
in front of customers And so they like that combo and maybe they said hey go talk to some customers and so I worked in LA for a little bit and then from there on I al always wanted to go to school. So after a little bit I basically went to CMU right after that and kind of since then have lived and built here in the United States and why machine learning that's why you studied in Carnegie Melon you know before you uh you know went at it again with startup. machine learning. Why? I think there was this uh so the to be honest I was there was a professor in um in Carnegie Melon and I had read his papers and work and there was this beautiful idea that the most powerful technologies seem to blend in day-to-day life and you don't even notice it and that's when you know you have done it well and I that idea really captivated and inspired me that like the fact that you don't have to be pompous
about a technology technology because it just works which means it is done well and I love that idea of craftsmanship behind it and then I had started computer science so machine learning was sort of the next frontier or avenue that was being explored and CMU had some of the best professors there could uh in machine learning back then so I basically went uh to do that uh right after I I kind of joined school and did my GR. So then you graduate and then you join a rocket ship, you know, App Dynamics, you know, in fact, we've had the founder on the podcast, too. So, how how was it like, you know, being an App Dynamics, being able to see the what it really looks like to be in a rocket ship that, you know, ended up being acquired for billions by Cisco? I mean, it was quite the outcome. It was fascinating. I learned a lot. I learned very, very quickly. And this is where I actually grew very
close to my mentor and now my board member and the founder of App Dynamics, Jodi Banzo. And I think it's it was sort of um a so for me the big takeaways was it is as you correctly said it was a rocket ship but I saw the rocket ship going from the inside and there was a little bit of like how every person's contribution mattered in scaling up the company. Second big learning for me was how Joti consistently intentionally crafted the culture within app dynamics and we had a term in ABD which was called startup within a startup where everybody was supposed to move with a lot of agency and I think that cultural element kind of has uh positioned through and then I think it also gave me personally the experience of like if you obsess about customers and you love doing that you can actually kind of build something from scratch and make a difference in a domain on a very painful problem. And all
those three things were very strong impressions for me personally as I started my career after school and ABD couldn't have been a more perfect place to do that. In fact, um I worked on some of the early observability technology stack and it's still today for my current startup. It's a core point of view in how we build our technology. And now in your guys' case, you know, after um App Dynamics, you actually went at it as an entrepreneur. Um how was that experience of really activating being an entrepreneur and and and diving into the unknown? I I think it was always uh filled with a lot of excitement and lot of anxiety. I think the anxiety was mostly because I was very poor. So you always have to worry about money a little bit. Uh but apart from that everything else was excitement. Uh so I I kind of like had done some research on what my next startup was going to be at school. I did
think there was a big market for it. And so I would say that uh at ABD when we were growing and scaling as an engineer I reached a point where you know some some work was assigned to me. I would finish that in two days. And then for 4 days, I was mostly playing pingpong and thinking about futuristic ideas. And I was like, hm, I'm not probably making the best use of my time. It's time for me to actually put my head to the screws and actually start building something. So, it was a lot of figuring out what I wanted to do like like any other process. Nothing super fancy about it, but I think the intention that nothing would give me more joy than building from scratch was abundantly clear. So I'd say 90% excitement, 10% anxiety. That's how it felt starting the first. So what was the journey like with Faulhorn and I guess you know what were you guys doing with Fauln? Yeah, so Faulhorn was an
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