Former Nutanix CEO and co-founder Dheeraj Pandey is back on the scene after a short hiatus heading up his new $50 million-backed venture DevRev, which aims to connect developers more quickly with revenue streams from their applications. The move is the first for Pandey following is surprise departure from Nutanix late last year.

Pandey explained that DevRev targets bridging the revenue (Rev) gap between developers (Dev) and end users. The cloud-based platform allows a developer to connect code to production and customer issues from a single pane of glass, or as he described it, “bringing the developer closer to that revenue stream.”

It basically acts as a customer relationship management layer between an application that a developer has produced or offers through an application store and those offering up money for that service. That layer is bolstered through the use of “a lot of” artificial intelligence that pulls data sitting in various lakes gathered through the build, operate, support, and growth phases of an application’s lifecycle.

“We are displacing these silos of bug tracking systems and ticketing systems and are really coming up with in-app everything, where you can really go to the dev and say look, all you need is a six lines of code to do engagement and promotion and placement and ticketing and all that stuff happening for your customers through your app,” Pandey said.

As for inspiration, Pandey cited work that Slack had initially done in targeting the developer community.

“I think we saw that Slack was delightful for our developers, and yet Slack didn't have the context of the customer identity, didn't have the cost context of the work that they were doing, the code that they were building on top of, and it didn't have any context of the product like what features, what capabilities, what's the history of the features and capabilities and how the deployment of microservices,” Pandey said. “We bring in a lot of that context awareness, this trifecta of product, and identity, and work into a highly collaborative and hopefully a lot of fun experience between developers and end users.”

The DevRev product is scheduled to hit the market by year-end.

DevRev is busting out of the gate with its $50 million in seed funding from Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures, and others. DevRev has already hired 75 people and is looking to build out teams in Austin, Texas; Bangalore, India; Slovenia; and Silicon Valley.

While DevRev’s seed funding is substantial, Pandey obviously brings a substantial name to the project. Having co-founded Nutanix in 2009, Pandey nearly a year ago made a surprise announcement that he was leaving the company. That decision also came on the heels of Nutanix securing $750 million in funding from Bain Capital.

In an interview at that time with SDxCentral, Pandey linked his decision to leave Nutanix to the COVID-19 pandemic and a desire to spend more time with his family.

“Being at home for the last six months, and thinking hard about what really matters, I need to commit to my family for at least the next year while we are still in this lockdown,” he told SDxCentral.

Pandey stayed on until the company named former VMware COO Rajiv Ramaswami its new CEO in December. Ramaswami’s hiring further stirred the pot between the two rival organizations, with VMware quickly filing a lawsuit against its former COO claiming a breach of his legal and contractual duties.

In the meantime, Pandey moved onto DevRev, which he linked to the work he has doing at Nutanix in changing that company’s business model to a software subscription-based service.

“At Nutanix we spent the last three and a half years trying to change the business model a couple of times, going from hardware to software to subscription to finally smaller subscriptions, which have annual contract values,” Pandey explained. “What was very clear is that this world is rapidly becoming really small, atomizing is the word. We are atomizing to 10s of cents, and dollars, and $10 a month kind of models. These very expensive, quarter-million, half-million, $10-million deals, those things will actually be much rarer than you think.”

This means business models must change, he added.

“The business model that obviously the VCs and the new startups talk about is it needs to be canonicalized,” Pandey continued. “Like, what does it mean to even say product lead growth? How does code drive sales? How does code drive customer support, or drive customer success? Those things we felt was a big opportunity for us to go and canonicalize and really build an operating system around.”