In this episode of The SaaS Revolution Show, host Alex Theuma is joined by DuploCloud Founder and CEO Venkat Thiruvengadam. 

Venkat shares his journey from Microsoft Azure to building a $50M-funded DevSecOps platform. He discusses bootstrapping the company for the first three years, through to leading the company through what he calls an “existential moment” for all SaaS businesses: the shift to AI-native operations.  

Key takeaways: 

  • Why bootstrapping for 3 years created the foundation for massive growth.
  • How AI killed the SaaS UX moat and why English-in, English-out is the new interface.
  • How to find product-market fit with startups vs enterprises.
  • The realities of founder life and constant reinvention.

The early bootstrapping advantage

DuploCloud’s journey to $1M ARR wasn’t fast, but it was intentional. Making the choice to stay bootstrapped, a small team of engineers worked on DuploCloud to reach this milestone. 

It was a conscious decision to help them find product-market fit, without external noise or pressure. Venkat explained:

“When you are founding a company and you’re running it, you have a lot of responsibilities, especially if you are venture backed. It’s not just the returns you have to produce for your investors, but you’ve also sold a lot of dreams to your employees. There’s external pressure when you haven’t even figured out your most basic pattern.”

For Venkat, moving a bit slower in the early stages and taking time to hone their ICP and messaging was crucial preparation for the changes that came after their Series A in 2021.

When VC becomes becomes helpful

Venkat’s experience with investors has evolved over time. Early on, the capital was the primary benefit. But after crossing $10M ARR, something shifted.

“Until about 10 million, I think it’s up to the founder to establish product-market fit and reasonable growth. Once we crossed 10, they got very deeply involved – to my benefit.”

His investors didn’t just provide oversight. They worked granularly with his head of sales, marketing, and engineering. They helped him understand customer success, quotas, and growth mechanics he’d never had to think about as a bootstrapped founder:

“I went from being a developer to founder CEO to eventually really learning how to scale go-to-market.” 

The transition required letting go of the bootstrapped mentality and embracing the machinery of venture-scale growth.

The AI pivot: Acting early at DuploCloud

Like many founders Venkat spent 2022 and 2023 monitoring what was happening in the AI space. By early 2024, he’d reached a stark conclusion about the future of SaaS. Having lived through the enterprise-to-cloud transformation at Microsoft Azure, he recognised the pattern.

“My perspective right now is that in the next few years, maybe five to 10 years, practically all SaaS companies will either transform to AI or they’ll get wiped out.” 

The reason isn’t just about better technology – it’s about the destruction of SaaS companies’ strongest competitive moat.

The UX moat is dead: When English becomes the new interface

On why this is such an existential moment for SaaS, Venkat said: 

 “A SaaS product’s moat is its workflow and UX that makes it sticky for the audience. AI killed that in one shot, replacing it with basically English-in, English-out.”

He explained, using Salesforce as an example, that a sticky interface and workflows have historically been the foundation of SaaS models – because it makes it nearly impossible for customers to switch to a competitor. 

AI removes that friction entirely. Instead of learning complex workflows, users can simply ask questions in plain English: “How many deals am I going to close this month?” or “Show me my late-stage pipeline.”

“Suddenly, it has taken the strongest moat that you had…It’s better that SaaS companies realise it sooner rather than later.”

Why DIY AI isn’t the threat founders think it is

While many SaaS companies fear customers will build their own AI solutions, Venkat sees a different reality. Building agents is one thing. Building fully vertical AI applications is another entirely.

“Tesla self-driving is a fully vertical AI application for the self-driving use case,” he points out. “You can have all the greatest models. It’s not easy to build that. You need cameras in place. They need to look elegant. They need to be wired into the machinery.”

The same principle applies to SaaS. AI provides the reasoning engine, but successful companies still need orchestration, implementation, and deep domain expertise. That’s where established SaaS companies have an advantage, if they act quickly enough.

Scaling go-to-market

$0-20M: Getting the fundamentals right

DuploCloud’s go-to-market strategy has developed in stages. Early on, it was about understanding where DuploCloud actually added the most value and how to communicate it: 

“We largely sell to startups and small businesses. Very early, I figured out that saying you don’t need to have so many DevOps engineers is not something that would resonate with large enterprises who have huge IT teams.”

With this insight, focus moved to companies that couldn’t afford to build out DevOps in-house, where DuploCloud’s automation platform would have the biggest impact.

From there, DuploCloud refined its message, and rooted it in security and compliance.

“As much as DevOps is an optimisation thing, compliance is existential. So we made that change and started talking about security, compliance. That was a transformational moment for us.”

$20M+

Venkat discussed how GTM challenges change once a company scales past $20M. He highlighted evolving into a multi-product company, managing churn, and building the internal infrastructure for scale as just some of the obstacles that need to be tackled.

But with this came opportunity, at DuploCloud they refined outbound processes and both customer and employee referrals started coming in.

Managing life as a founder: The constant reinvention challenge

After seven years of building DuploCloud, Venkat has developed a realistic perspective on founder life. 

“I don’t know where to start. There’s always some fire. You wake up in the morning – there’s something or other that is always broken,” he said.

He talked about the responsibilities of being a founder and “the commitments you make and dreams you’ve sold people” but perhaps the biggest frustration is the fact that success in tech is temporary by design. 

“You can never be lax. Today you may be doing very well. You may be a high flying company, you may be a SaaS unicorn and guess what, a year later, people don’t care about the SaaS unicorn simply because you’re not AI.”

This reality keeps Venkat moving. From DevOps to compliance messaging. From traditional SaaS to AI-native positioning. Each shift requires rebuilding parts of the company while maintaining momentum.

Hear more about what AI means for SaaS (and how to stay ahead)

Venkat’s message was clear: SaaS companies need to transform or be left behind. And it’s a sentiment echoed by other founders leading through this AI shift.

Hear more from leading founders and GTM leaders how they’re adapting on recent episodes of the podcast: