Just as infrastructure transitioned from hardware-defined to software-defined, the B2B world is experiencing a similar shift to product-lead everything, DevRev CEO Dheeraj Pandey told SDxCentral.

The "new world" he describes is founded on product-led growth, product-led support, and product-lead operations. "We feel like this will be a very different world" compared to "the old world of just throwing more support agents at the problem," Pandey said.

DevRev, which Pandey founded after leaving his position as CEO at Nutanix, raised $50 million in seed funding last year to unify its customers' operations through a focus on product. B2C adopted in-app discovery, search, training sessions, and promotions over the past two decades, and now it's B2B's turn to copy those lessons learned, according to Pandey.

He expects the next two decades will be consumed with the transition from "the old world SaaS to the new world SaaS or product-lead SaaS," similar to how the past two decades have seen shifts from on-prem infrastructure to old world SaaS.

DevRev's platform DevCRM, which will be generally available this month, "is not just about sales, just about marketing, or just about support, but it is really about the product and the end user," Pandey said. "That's how you unify a company's operations – when everybody thinks about the product, and everybody thinks about the end user."

Collaboration is another big part of achieving that unity, he added, and conversations should include developers, product managers, customer support engineers, and end users.

On top of the DevCRM platform, Pandey said the first "killer app" is customer support, but he really sees it as customer engineering. "It's about moving from agents to support engineers," he said.

Compared to people-led support, customers would rather have engineering professionals help out with "all things escalation" and "really make it product-led," Pandey explained.

He explained that rather than traditional support ticketing, DevRev provides conversations and understanding of product enhancements. And instead of rule-based engines, which are about resource allocation of support agents, DevRev is shifting toward machine learning models, conversational artificial intelligence (AI), auto-clustering, auto-classification, and auto-deduplication "of all the work and the data that's coming from the customer side," he said.

Since DevRev's seed raise, the company has raised another $20 million in continuous funding via Web3 securitized tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. "An accredited investor who's willing to invest early in a young company like ours is more than welcome," Pandey said.

DevRev has been raising capital on a monthly basis from small investors including friends and family who wanted to write small checks, Pandey said. This is possible through automation and digitization of the token, he explained, allowing the company to "take $50,000 checks from anybody who's accredited in the U.S."

"The idea of continuous funding is going to be a mind boggling new way of keeping yourself hydrated every month [and] every quarter rather than doing these waterfall funding rounds once a year," he said.