After leading SRE.ai’s $7.2M seed round, Salesforce Ventures investors Rob Keith and Dom Pusateri interviewed CEO Rajsekhar Kadiyala about why he and co-founder Edward Ayree built SRE.ai, lessons learned from their journey to date, advice for raising capital, and much more.

Rob Keith: How would you describe SRE.ai’s mission?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: Our mission is to make enterprise software reliability autonomous — so every builder can move faster, deliver with confidence, and scale without limits. Developer teams should have confidence that they can build quickly and safely to better enable their sales teams, revenue teams, customers, and all other aspects of their business.

Dom Pusateri: What inspired you and Edward to start SRE.ai?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: In our time at Google, we experienced world-class DevOps and infrastructure tooling — Google literally invented the term SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). However, we realized in our work that there was a huge gap between what other people are using and the best-in-class tools we had access to.

It wasn’t a single lightbulb moment that launched the company, but rather thousands of them. Every time we talked to engineers spending hours untangling metadata conflicts instead of shipping value, it gnawed at us. Enterprises were stitching together dozens of tools, building brittle pipelines, and firefighting instead of innovating. What inspired us was the idea that AI could change that dynamic — not just by automating tasks, but by making infrastructure and application management accessible in plain language. We wanted to bring the same level of abstraction that Salesforce brought to business users, but for the engineering backbone of enterprises.

Rob Keith: When SRE.ai set out to raise a seed round, what types of partners were you looking for, and why did you ultimately choose Salesforce Ventures as your lead?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: More than anything, we were looking for people who’d had experience with the problem or were deeply tied to the ecosystem. The benefit of this approach is that we gain firsthand experience to add to our team as we engage with customers, resulting in a wealth of knowledge to help us deliver as efficiently and completely as possible.

We first met with the Salesforce Ventures team around YC Demo Day. Salesforce Ventures has a fantastic track record of supporting YC founders and companies — we continued to hear positive stories and feedback from other alumni, and knew that as an investor, Salesforce Ventures would be incredible to have on board.

Dom Pusateri: What role do you see Salesforce Ventures playing in SRE.ai’s growth?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: We see Salesforce Ventures as a partner that can help us accelerate go-to-market and build credibility with enterprise buyers. The network and platform expertise can help us amplify our reach and validate our solution in front of exactly the right customers.

In the long term, our goal is to redefine how enterprise teams manage deployments across complex SaaS platforms. We view Salesforce Ventures as a partner who can help us expand into adjacent ecosystems.

Rob Keith: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received as a founder?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: Marc Benioff once said, “you need to get to the future, ahead of your customers, and be ready to greet them when they arrive.” As engineers, we get excited about the tech — about building something necessary that couldn’t have existed in the past. But time and time again, we see that being grounded in the customer pain points and keeping our focus on delivering an experience that will fundamentally change customers’ businesses for the better is everything.

Dom Pusateri: If you were starting SRE.ai from scratch today, what would you do differently?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: In addition to focusing on a particular ecosystem like we did, I would start with an even narrower, high-value use case and expand. Looking back, I would prioritize observability and incident response over deployment workflows because that’s where we are seeing a lot of headroom in customer conversations.

Rob Keith: What’s something you’ve changed your mind about since launching SRE.ai?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: In the early days, every decision felt like life or death. I’ve learned that progress often beats perfection; a non-optimal solution isn’t the end of the world, as long as we keep moving forward and learning quickly.

Dom Pusateri: What’s your most controversial opinion about building a business?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work. For enterprise SaaS, trust and reliability matter more than speed at any cost. The fastest way to win is to strike a balance between innovation and stability.

Rob Keith: What leadership skill have you had to develop most to be successful?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: The ability to balance decisiveness with a high standard. It’s really important to gather enough information to make a well-informed choice and then move forward earnestly.

Dom Pusateri: How do you make decisions when there’s no obvious right answer?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: We focus on principles: customer impact, long-term scalability, and alignment with our values. When data is inconclusive, we prioritize learning — choosing the path that will teach us the most, fastest.

Rob Keith: What do you think founders waste too much time or energy on?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: Over-optimizing pitch decks, vanity metrics, or “theater” activities. The real work is talking to customers, iterating on product, and building trust.

Dom Pusateri: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from raising your seed round?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: At the end of the day, customer love and trust are the only metrics that matter. Also, a lot of folks will say you need to stress a large TAM and market size when pitching investors, but the vast majority of investors we met valued our niche focus and understood that companies evolve and expand beyond their niche naturally.

Rob Keith: As you look to the future of SRE.ai, what excites you?

Rajsekhar Kadiyala: We’re excited to prove that AI-native DevOps and Observability isn’t just a vision but an industry standard. In the next phase, we’ll scale adoption across enterprises, expand with our early partners, and continue to deliver automation that turns complexity into clarity. Companies are still navigating the transition toward agentic solutions — we’re really excited to connect those solutions to bottom-line company value.

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To learn more about SRE.ai, read our investment announcement. To receive Salesforce Ventures content directly in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.

After leading OneVest’s Series B fundraise, investors Zak Kokosa, Pascha Hao, and Rob Keith sat down with CEO Amar Ahluwalia to discuss why he started OneVest alongside co-founders Jakob Pizzera and Nathan Di Lucca, his vision for the future of wealth management, lessons for fellow entrepreneurs, and much more. The following is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity and style.

Zak Kokosa: What inspired you to start OneVest?

Amar Ahluwalia: Jakob, Nathan, and myself have all spent well over a decade across traditional financial services and fintech witnessing countless problems and opportunities on a daily basis. During the pandemic, we started talking about how wealth management technology is broken and legacy, and hasn’t caught up with other industries from an innovation perspective.

This eventually inspired us to create a company that could revolutionize the wealth management industry. We saw how modern technology has been able to transform other industries, and we wanted to do the same for wealth management.

Pascha Hao: What problem is OneVest aiming to solve, and how has your vision evolved over time?

Amar Ahluwalia: Financial institutions delivering wealth management to investors currently use a mix of dozens of legacy vendors, with Excel spreadsheets holding things together in the background. This means they’re often not able to enhance client and advisor experiences but have been incurring ever increasing costs. OneVest is addressing this problem by offering an operating system for wealth management. We started out primarily positioning OneVest as a full-suite solution – which it still is. However, we’ve found real power in our modular infrastructure. Larger firms may not be in the position for a full technology overhaul. With OneVest, they can replace what needs immediate replacement (such as Onboarding or a Client Portal), before expanding to other opportunity areas.

Over time, we’ve been able to build a company that now counts large financial institutions like Westwood Wealth Management, DriveWealth and ATB as customers. We’ve scaled to over 80 employees and counting, and have expanded our operations from Canada into the U.S.

Rob Keith: Why is the OneVest team uniquely qualified to modernize wealth management?

Amar Ahluwalia: Each of us brings unique and relevant experience to the table. I have extensive experience within financial services, fintech, asset management and capital markets. Prior to OneVest, I was on the executive and leadership teams at Coast Capital, OnDeck, and IHS Markit. Jakob worked across strategy, product, and operations at technology pioneers Shopify and Element AI, and used to be a derivatives trader at a global investment bank in a prior life. Nathan held several software engineering leadership roles at Kudos, Donesafe, and Workible. With our mix of financial services and technology experience, we understand where the wealth management industry is today, and where it can go with the right technology.

Zak Kokosa: Why did the OneVest team decide to partner with Salesforce Ventures for your recent fundraise?

Amar Ahluwalia: OneVest has experienced massive growth since our founding in 2021. To help facilitate that growth, we were seeking partners who understand the enterprise SaaS space and who would give us the freedom to innovate and be an industry leader.

We first learned about Salesforce Ventures through our network in the tech and financial services sectors, and through our partnership discussions with Salesforce. Your reputation for supporting innovative enterprise SaaS companies made you an attractive partner. We were also impressed by your team’s deep understanding of the financial services industry globally, and your collaborative approach and strategic insights that aligned well with our vision.

Ultimately we chose Salesforce Ventures to lead our round because we wanted an investor that also felt like a partner. As part of our due diligence process, we got to meet several individuals across the business and it solidified our view that the entire team deeply understands what we’re building and what we’re trying to achieve.

Pascha Hao: How do you see OneVest benefitting from partnering with Salesforce Ventures?

Amar Ahluwalia: We like that Salesforce Ventures has a “patient capital” approach, with a long-term vision in mind. That appeals to us because building an enduring business in enterprise SaaS in a highly regulated environment like financial services takes a long time and sustained support.

We see Salesforce Ventures playing a pivotal role in our long-term growth via strategic guidance, industry connections, and resources that extend beyond financial investment. Your support in driving partnership alignment with the broader Salesforce team will help us scale our platform and reach new markets. OneVest already has an integration with Salesforce CRM to enhance our client and advisor experiences. However, the current iteration only scratches the surfaces of what could be possible when Salesforce Ventures and OneVest work together to bring innovative solutions to our sector. By collaborating on product innovation and GTM efforts globally — we think OneVest and Salesforce can benefit tremendously.

Rob Keith: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received as a founder?

Amar Ahluwalia: Stay focused. Avoid shiny objects.

Zak Kokosa: If you were starting OneVest from scratch today, what would you do differently?

Amar Ahluwalia: Expand to the U.S. sooner, or build the company there from the start.

Pascha Hao: What’s something you’ve changed your mind on since starting OneVest?

Amar Ahluwalia: There are no (few) brilliant ideas. Only brilliant execution.

Rob Keith: What’s the most controversial opinion you have about building a business?

Amar Ahluwalia: You don’t need to say yes to every growth opportunity — sometimes the best decisions are the ones where you walk away.

Zak Kokosa: What lessons have you learned from this fundraising journey?

Amar Ahluwalia: Build relationships early, be transparent about your challenges, and focus on investors who bring more than just money to the table.

Pascha Hao: As you think about the future of OneVest, what excites you the most?

Amar Ahluwalia: We are excited for the company’s growth and expansion into new global markets while building an enduring market leader in the wealth management technology space. The industry is moving toward digitization, hyper-personalization, and automation. OneVest aims to lead this evolution by providing a platform that integrates cutting-edge technology with user-centric design, making wealth management more efficient. As AI continues to become a force across all industries, we will lead the way with an AI-enabled platform that allows firms and their advisors to deliver the best possible experience to clients.

And Salesforce Ventures will be instrumental to all our future plans — providing strategic insights, connecting us with key players, and helping us leverage their ecosystem to scale faster and smarter.

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To learn more about OneVest, visit their website.

After making Argmax the first investment out of Salesforce Ventures new $500M Generative AI fund, investors Caroline Fiegel and Jason Spinnell sat down with CEO Atila Orhon to discuss Argmax’s origins, how the company has changed over time, why Argmax partnered with Salesforce Ventures, and more. The following is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity and style.

Caroline Fiegel: What inspired you to build Argmax?

Atila Orhon: I dropped out of a PhD to join Apple in 2018 so I could build machine learning (ML) technology that billions of people use everyday. Over the years, I wore many hats: training ML models that ship as iOS features, developing tools for efficient on-device inference for other engineers, and eventually technical leadership. In 2022, we open-sourced some of our work in efficient on-device inference for Transformers and the reception changed my view on the state of the industry entirely. Things we had figured out several years ago were still bleeding edge problems for many developers and enterprises who are extremely competent in every other topic. Realizing that we were living in the future at Apple due to our early bet on on-device ML, I wanted to pull the future forward for the broader industry.

I was working on Apple Intelligence in late 2023 and it was super fun. I loved my leadership (I still do, we go hiking on weekends) and my peers but I realized that 2024 was the perfect time to start building to be ready to go-to-market when the market window opens in 2025. So in November 2023 I left Apple and founded Argmax.

I felt on-device inference was not predestined to be a huge market unless a strong player emerged to break the perceived limitations, similar to what Tesla achieved for the EV market. Why would a young startup be that strong player and not the incumbents? Because the incumbents are not fully incentive-aligned with developers who are building cross-platform products that will run on devices that were sold 5 years ago, in some cases competing with the incumbent’s first-party applications as a third-party.

Jason Spinell: How has your vision for Argmax evolved over time?

Atila Orhon: In the first month, we were dead focused on bringing frontier LLMs to mobile phones by investing heavily in model compression R&D. We were probably too aggressive in pulling the future forward and did not stop to think who needed that problem solved.

While interviewing prospective customers, we quickly realized that projects that are close to production had much more practical problems that were addressable by rigorous engineering using (mostly) existing technology. With that insight, we pivoted to building frameworks to bring popular and useful Foundation Models On Device (FMOD), starting with WhisperKit.

We became an open-source first company because we believe this is the only way to make an industry-wide impact and make on-device inference the dominant solution for Foundation Models in production. The primary benefit of open-source is that most companies that productionize Foundation Models do not reinvent the wheel — they adopt open-source systems and architectures as a starting point and tweak or fine-tune on top. Our tools and frameworks stay compatible with proprietary models of prospective customers because of their shared open-source origins.

Caroline Fiegel: Tell us about the team behind Argmax.

Atila Orhon: I met Zach Nagengast (Head of Software at Argmax) on GitHub when he dropped a huge Pull Request (PR) on Apple’s Stable Diffusion repo that I had launched. Pedro Cuenca, an ML engineer from Hugging Face, and I had been working on the exact same feature (for diffusion nerds: SDXL in Core ML) for several weeks and we had even drafted a blog post on it. When we saw Zach’s PR drop a few hours before we were about to publish our work, Pedro was like “OMG.” I reached out to Zach over Twitter and he was super cool about sunsetting his PR to let us publish ours. Over the next few months, Zach kept contributing more and more. These open-source PRs ended up becoming an unofficial 3-month long coding interview before I was convinced that he should be the chief software architect at Argmax. He joined the founding team on Day 1.

I met Brian Keene (Head of Performance at Argmax) when we joined Apple around the same time in 2018. We were on sister teams. He was always working closer to the Metal (for Apple nerds: pun intended). He was an architect on the OG team that built the first on-device inference engine that was preinstalled in iOS, a version of which backs Core ML to this day. When I heard that he serendipitously became an Apple alumni around the same time as me, we teamed up right away. There are less than a handful folks in the world who have a holistic understanding of on-device inference performance and Brian was a natural choice for the chief performance role.

Gary L. (VP of Product) was a godsend. He was independently convinced of our vision before I even uttered a single word during his interviews (which lasted a total of 7 hours across 3 sessions because he created a GTM proposal and correctly guesstimated our approach and progress up to that point). His experience match was uncanny: He witnessed consumer hardware inflections and challenges of on-device processing at MediaTek, where he spent 7 years. He also spent 7 years at Google where he was instrumental in one of Google’s first major on-device ML projects at scale: Google Lens. He joined just a few months after the founding when many folks said that “perhaps a VP of Product is too early for your company phase.” He proved me right by pioneering a new business model for our unique and opinionated technology platform in his first few months. I’m glad we invested early in onboarding him because it would have been too late to figure that all out now.

Jason Spinell: Why was Argmax seeking a new round of funding, and what kind of partners were you looking for?

Earlier this year, our open-source traction led to commercial inbound that was too strong to ignore. We decided to double down on our most in-demand project (WhisperKit) and accelerate our roadmap in Speech AI by growing the team earlier than previously expected. This turned out to be a great opportunity to seek out a new partner whose view of the future was aligned with ours.

We highly value investors who can bet on a founding team obsessed with supercharging a fledgling market within the next couple of years. Both Salesforce Ventures and General Catalyst stood out based on their market view and confidence in our approach.

Caroline Fiegel: Why did you choose Salesforce Ventures as a partner?

Atila Orhon: I interviewed several founders who partnered with Salesforce Ventures in the past and their references made a very positive impression on me.

After the initial partner meeting, your team did a quick Salesforce internal survey which showed that Argmax technology was already being used at Salesforce and that was the canary in the coal mine that led to Salesforce Ventures’ decision to lead Argmax’s seed round. It’s a very high bar that an investor would already be using your product before they invest in your company but I am glad Salesforce and Salesforce Ventures exceeded that bar and we are thrilled to partner with them.

Jason Spinell: What are you most excited about as you look ahead to the next phase of your company’s growth?

Atila Orhon: Our business model aligns our incentives with that of our customers: If their products powered by Argmax go viral, we go viral. So the next commercial phase of our company is all about supporting our customers as they go into production with their next-gen Argmax-powered products. I am most excited about demonstrating the correlation between our customers’ success metrics and the adoption of Argmax tools and frameworks.

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If you’re a founder building across AI, enterprise SaaS, or impact, we’d love to talk. To get in with Caroline Fiegel, email her at cfiegel@salesforce.com. To get in touch with Jason Spinell, email him at jspinell@salesforce.com.