Abhi Sharma On Raising $60 Million To Build An AI Platform Helping Organizations Gain Visibility And Control Over Their Enterprise-Wide Data Processing

A second-time founder and a technologist at heart, Abhi Sharma has built and sold companies, raised over $60M in venture funding for Relyance AI, a category-defining platform at the intersection of data security, AI governance, and privacy compliance.

Relyance AI has secured funding from top-tier investors like Menlo Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and Cheyenne Partners.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Yield to your inner founder spark. Even with uncertainty, embracing leadership is essential to shaping the company’s direction and culture.
• Relying solely on personal networks can stall growth. Abhi learned that a structured, values-driven recruiting system is critical for sustainable team scaling.
• Relyance AI was built on the conviction that privacy, security, and AI governance would converge—a bet that’s now paying off as these domains rapidly intersect.
• Rather than follow conventional startup advice to narrow focus, Relyance AI was built as a platform from day one, anticipating the merging of compliance, data security, and AI governance.
• In an AI-first world, data quality, frequency, and protection are directly tied to business outcomes, making governance and observability mission-critical.
• The pandemic transformed pitch delivery almost overnight. Abhi’s experience shows that adaptability and a strong co-founder dynamic matter more than ideal timing.
• Abhi emphasizes that being a founder means constantly evolving—becoming a product-market fit machine and mastering new aspects of the business at every stage.

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About Abhi Sharma:

Abhi Sharma is a 2X tech entrepreneur and machine learning expert. He spent most of his career building tech and go-to-market for products involving compilers, real-time/large-scale data processing, machine learning, and observability tools for continuous visibility into data flows.

Given his work in compilers, Abhi became obsessed with simplifying the expressibility of data-processing intent while automatically synthesizing data types, computation intent, call graphs, and data flows in applications and machine learning models.

In 2019, Abhi started advising first-time founders on product/go-to-market and was a technologist-in-residence in venture capital. During this time, he was actively exploring how extreme domain specializations in various industries could slow down the speed of innovation, cross-pollination of ideas, and thus human progress overall.

Abhi even saw this manifest as silos between different departments within organizations. Ever since, he has been passionate about applying meta-modeling, and machine learning to challenging problems at the intersection of widely different domains.

Connect with Abhi Sharma:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to The DealMaker Show. Today we have a proven founder—someone who has already done it and is now on his second business, which is quite a rocket ship. We’re going to dive into all the good stuff we like to hear: the building, the scaling, the financing, and the exit.

Alejandro Cremades: We’ll also be discussing the intersection of privacy, data, security, and AI, as well as fundraising. They did all of this during the heart of the pandemic and faced challenges like not hiring an internal recruiting team fast enough. A lot of lessons were learned—lessons we’ll be diving into—so brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation. Without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today.

Alejandro Cremades: Abhi Sharma, welcome to the show.

Abhi Sharma: Thanks for having me. Very typical Indian middle-class, lower middle-class family—although I would say we had beautiful views of the snow-covered mountains back in India.

Alejandro Cremades: So, originally born and raised in the northern part of India. I know you moved quite a bit growing up too. How was life growing up for you?

Abhi Sharma: I was very close to the Kashmir border. My father was an academic, so he moved around because of teaching. Eventually, we spent a lot of time in the western part of India.

Abhi Sharma: So if I were to summarize, it was lots of love, very low on economic production, but filled with virtues and foundational values as I grew up in India.

Alejandro Cremades: And you studied computer science. What got you into computers to begin with?

Abhi Sharma: It was interesting. As a kid, I always thought I wanted to be a doctor. I kept telling my parents that was my ambition. One day, an uncle of mine said, “Why don’t you dissect this frog?” It used to rain a lot where I lived, so there were a lot of frogs.

Abhi Sharma: I said, “Holy no, I’m not going to dissect the frog.” That’s when I realized I was fascinated by the idea of being a doctor—I wasn’t actually into it. Early on, I was good at school and good at math, and I got interested in computers because I could build things and write early apps. Computers were still fascinating when I was growing up. We were quite poor, so I got my first computer quite late in school. But when I finally did, I jumped on and used dial-up to connect to the world. That captured my imagination.

Abhi Sharma: Eventually, after about a year of using computers for fun, I realized I wanted to build with them and headed in that direction.

Alejandro Cremades: So you ended up entering the startup world—and that’s actually how you got into the U.S. Walk us through that.

Abhi Sharma: I was always a bit of a black sheep in the family—very different, very unique. For some reason, I had this intention that I wanted to build something. Whatever I was good at, I wanted to put it out into the world. Back then, I was pretty good at school.

Abhi Sharma: The status quo in India during my undergrad was: if you had a great score, you went to work for Microsoft, IBM, or Google. The school supported that, and the pay was good.

Abhi Sharma: But I felt I wouldn’t be able to see the direct impact of my work on customers. I wanted to be on the edge, to build something and get direct feedback from customers. That mattered to me.

Abhi Sharma: So I joined a very tiny startup in India—at a time when startups weren’t cool. My parents were confused: “What does it even mean to go to a startup?”

Abhi Sharma: One of the founders had moved back to India, though most of the business was in the U.S. I worked there for about six months, and they thought, “This kid is smart. Let’s send him to the U.S.” They were entering a new market.

Abhi Sharma: I was good at the platform and enjoyed working with customers. So they sent me to talk to customers in LA.

Abhi Sharma: I had always wanted to go to school, so after a bit of time in LA, I enrolled at CMU and have lived and built in the U.S. ever since.

Alejandro Cremades: Why machine learning? That’s what you studied at Carnegie Mellon before diving into startups again. Why that field?

Abhi Sharma: Honestly, there was a professor at Carnegie Mellon whose papers and work I had read. He talked about how the most powerful technologies blend into daily life so seamlessly that you don’t even notice them.

Abhi Sharma: That idea captivated me—the notion that if something just works, and doesn’t need to be flashy, it’s done well. I loved the craftsmanship behind that.

Abhi Sharma: I had studied computer science, and machine learning felt like the next frontier. CMU had some of the best professors in the field, so I pursued that path after completing my GRE and joining the school.

Alejandro Cremades: After graduation, you joined AppDynamics—a rocket ship. We’ve had the founder on the podcast too. What was it like being part of a company that was later acquired for billions by Cisco?

Abhi Sharma: It was fascinating. I learned a lot—very quickly. That’s where I got close to my mentor and now board member, Jyoti Bansal, the founder of AppDynamics.

Abhi Sharma: The big takeaways: yes, it was a rocket ship, but I saw it from the inside. I saw how every individual’s contribution mattered in scaling the company. Jyoti was intentional in crafting the culture at AppDynamics.

Abhi Sharma: We had a term—“startup within a startup”—which meant everyone operated with a lot of agency. That cultural element has stuck with me. Also, it gave me the experience of seeing that if you obsess about solving painful customer problems, you can build something meaningful from scratch.

Abhi Sharma: At AppDynamics, I worked on early observability tech, and that’s still a core part of how we build at my current startup.

Alejandro Cremades: After AppDynamics, you launched your own startup. How was that experience—becoming an entrepreneur and diving into the unknown?

Abhi Sharma: It was filled with excitement—and anxiety. Mostly anxiety about money because I was very poor.

Abhi Sharma: But everything else was excitement. While I was at school, I did some research into startup ideas and saw a market opportunity. At AppDynamics, I reached a point as an engineer where I’d finish assigned work in two days, and then spend the rest of the week playing ping pong and thinking about futuristic ideas.

Abhi Sharma: I realized I wasn’t making the best use of my time. I needed to build something from scratch. There was nothing fancy about it—it was a process. But it was clear to me that building from scratch brought me the most joy.

Abhi Sharma: So, 90% excitement, 10% anxiety. That’s how it felt to start the first one.

Alejandro Cremades: What was the journey like with Foghorn? What were you guys building?

Abhi Sharma: Foghorn was an IoT analytics startup—very similar to what Samsara does today. We had a similar product. It was started at an incubator in Palo Alto.

Abhi Sharma: I was fresh out of school. A few technical minds came together and joined this incubator. They were intentionally funding certain categories and startup styles, and we fit the bill.

Abhi Sharma: They were incubating projects around specific ideas, and I found like-minded people to build with. That’s how Foghorn happened.

Abhi Sharma: It was an IoT analytics product. We ran it for about four and a half to five years and were acquired by Johnson Controls in late 2019 or early 2020.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. You mentioned Samsara’s founder—we had him on the podcast too. What was it like going through the acquisition with Foghorn? That full-cycle moment of entrepreneurship—how did that shape your perspective as you moved on to your next venture, Reliance?

Abhi Sharma: It was a very teaching experience. So many things have to go right for a startup to reach an exit—whether that’s an acquisition or going public.

Abhi Sharma: If I reflect back, the journey was full of learnings. I learned where to optimize, where to focus, where to execute well—and just as importantly, what not to do.

Abhi Sharma: I told you Foghorn had a similar product to Samsara. So why is Samsara huge and Foghorn was acquired? That’s one way to think about it.

Abhi Sharma: We made some mistakes. Foghorn gave me a ramp to learn how to build a company, but also gave me strong lessons on what to avoid.

Alejandro Cremades: If there’s one big lesson on what not to do, what would you share with everyone listening?

Abhi Sharma: Personally, it was the fear I had. Foghorn was my first startup. I was just out of college and very poor.

Abhi Sharma: I had this self-imposed idea that I was “just a smart engineer.” What did I know about running a business?

Abhi Sharma: I had two paths: raise money for my idea and be CEO, or join an incubator, hire an exec team, and play a technical leadership role.

Abhi Sharma: I chose the less risky path. And looking back, I think that was a big mistake. I should have run the company the traditional way—even with fear and no money.

Abhi Sharma: There’s something fundamental about the founder’s DNA, even if it’s naive or raw. That energy drives innovation. I should have embraced that from the start.

Abhi Sharma: And so, for me, that was the biggest learning that I took. I took a little bit of time to think that, of course, there are all these successful people and they know better. But what ends up happening is, in your unique scenario—your startup—you have to have a little bit more confidence and leap in for it to do this better. So that, for me, was the biggest learning from Foghorn personally.

Alejandro Cremades: So, Reliance. How does the idea of Reliance come knocking, and why do you take action with it? Because, I mean, obviously now, as a second-time founder, you know what made sense and what didn’t. So, given the experience—why Reliance?

Abhi Sharma: I think two things, personally, for me. Whenever your company gets acquired, as early founders, you spend a lot of time soul-searching on what you want to do next. And for me—I won’t go into too much detail—but it was very important that I work at the intersection of domains.

Abhi Sharma: And I was good at three things: compilers, machine learning, and observability. And I was like, what are those things that I can apply to something that is going to have a meaningful impact in the world?

Abhi Sharma: And I had two areas around—real-time biotech and basically data.

Abhi Sharma: And I was closer to data with my experience. Also, I’m very close to the machine learning community. So, back in 2020, it was very clear to me that there will be a time in the future where we would live in a world where there was “before AI” and “after AI,” and we would look at the world differently.

Abhi Sharma: So, when I looked at things from that perspective, it was very clear to me that data protection, data security, the compliance, and governance of it would be exceptionally important.

Abhi Sharma: It was a very underserved market. And I thought that I had something between observability and machine learning that could be uniquely applied to this space, which had a completely different point of view on how to solve these problems.

Abhi Sharma: So that is where my conviction came from. And then, as all things happen, with some amount of luck and serendipity, I met my co-founder, who happened to be a privacy compliance expert. And so we talked a little bit about it, and she equally thought that the space was totally bad and not handled well.

Abhi Sharma: And we had a unique moment in time where we could build a piece of technology with a different perspective, and we could serve the world globally with it. So that was the reason I started Reliance—satisfying the personal itch of working or applying what I was particularly good at to a unique domain I could rethink from the bottom up.

Abhi Sharma: And then, of course, as a businessperson, you have to take a pragmatic perspective. And for me, it’s like I have a checklist: How fast can I build at least a 500 million ARR business and work backwards from there? And everything in my checklist for Reliance, as a hypothesis for the business, made sense.

Abhi Sharma: So I combined both those things together and started it right at the heart of the pandemic.

Alejandro Cremades: So, for the people that are listening, how do you guys make money? What’s the business model of Reliance?

Abhi Sharma: Yeah, so Reliance sells software as a service—an annual subscription model. We have multiple products in privacy compliance, data security posture management, and AI governance.

Abhi Sharma: And you can kind of pick and choose à la carte some portions of the product, and you pay an annual subscription fee that is tied to some dimension—amount of assets and number of things monitored in your environment.

Alejandro Cremades: And now—you were alluding to it—starting it in the pandemic. You guys also did fundraising during the pandemic. How much capital have you raised to date, Abhi?

Abhi Sharma: We’ve raised about 60 million so far.

Alejandro Cremades: And what was the experience like, especially raising through the pandemic and crazy cycles like that?

Abhi Sharma: It was very interesting because, when we started to pitch Reliance, we were doing it in person in investor offices. By the time we stopped pitching, it was completely over Zoom.

Abhi Sharma: And this is over a period of less than four weeks. That is how fast we transitioned from being intimately in-person to being completely on Zoom. And I felt like the difficulty of communicating the passion and vision of our ideas was harder.

Abhi Sharma: Although overall—net-net—we did not have a big challenge raising our seed round, because as a second-time founder, you always have a little bit more credibility. We had a great network of people. And I do think that people saw the uniqueness of how we were approaching the problem—because seed rounds are always about the founder more than the idea.

Abhi Sharma: And so we had a unique yin and yang—a deep machine learning expert and a subject matter expert coming together to solve a problem. Deep passion. But it was interesting fundraising in that environment, because whatever we thought would happen in the plan, it all went opposite because of COVID in terms of just the time and logistics of the fundraising.

Abhi Sharma: But overall, I wouldn’t say we struggled raising funds for Reliance. But it was interesting having those conversations and the cycles going on between people, because people immediately started—like the funny incident I remember is—people used to ask us about our team and if we had hired anybody when we started.

Abhi Sharma: Three, four weeks into fundraising, people assumed everybody was in-person. By the time we had some of our last pitches, people were like, “So how is your team distributed geographically across the U.S.?” because everybody assumed it would be remote. It was very funny.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, I know that when it comes to people too, I know that one of the biggest things you’ve experienced is not hiring the engine internal to really hire fast and really build a team fast. I mean, right now, you guys have about 120 employees. Walk us through that big lesson around having that internal engine of recruiting.

Abhi Sharma: Yeah, great question. So I think this is a personal lesson that I’ve deeply learned. One of the things with Reliance was pretty much everybody that had worked for me or with me at Foghorn eventually actually showed up at Reliance, which was a huge moment of pride and enjoyment for myself, because all these were people from Stanford and MIT and Google, and they could go work anywhere—but they chose to come join me.

Abhi Sharma: So what ended up happening is that the initial hiring of the first 10 to 15 people came from my network—mostly engineers, of course, that’s what you need when you start a tech business.

Abhi Sharma: I did not intentionally design the recruiting engine of the company—our recruiting philosophies, how do we recruit, what is important? Because that came so easily to us at the start, eventually the recruiting system—and not building a recruiting engine internally—kind of became a thing of its own, where we ended up hiring a bunch of people, sometimes both on the executive side and early members, who were not a good fit for Reliance at that time.

Abhi Sharma: And then you also spend a lot of time recruiting from third-party agencies. So I think I was probably six or nine months delayed in building a recruiting culture at Reliance.

Abhi Sharma: And I think for me, the biggest lesson there was: you have to be so intentional in the early parts of the company—which is obviously clichéd when people talk about it—but it’s not just about finding the right talent. It’s about building a machine inside, with a culture and a point of view, that can start to attract the right talent, especially after you exhaust your circle of 15–20 people that know and trust you really well.

Abhi Sharma: I think it took us a while, and because I delayed not building that early enough.

Abhi Sharma: Maybe that cost us some time at Reliance in the early building days. Obviously, we fixed it, and now we have a fantastic engine. But early on, I think we suffered by me not paying attention. It’s almost like—that’s kind of the biggest lesson for me as a founder to myself. What I remind myself is: anything you don’t craft with intention takes a shape of its own, takes a culture of its own—and usually, it’s something you’re not going to like.

Alejandro Cremades: So, obviously, when we’re talking about people here, I want to ask you a question—because they are always betting on a vision, on a future that you’re living into, Abhi. Whether it’s investors, employees, even customers.

Alejandro Cremades: So if you were to go to sleep tonight, Abhi, and wake up in a world where the vision of Reliance is fully realized, what does that world look like?

Abhi Sharma: The world looks simple in two sentences for me: AI agents are running the world, and Reliance AI is the infrastructure—the highway—that our customers are using to trust and govern them.

Alejandro Cremades: So, to double-click on that—why don’t you talk to us about that convergence of privacy, data security, and AI?

Abhi Sharma: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think what’s happening is, if you look at data privacy and users, you look at data security—which is a big topic—and now, of course, the usage of AI.

Abhi Sharma: There are three big things that are fundamentally changing in the world of software that didn’t happen before. Number one: data used to be a side effect of code.

Abhi Sharma: It was inert. It used to just sit there because you wrote an API, you wrote some code, you did something. Now, the quality, the distribution, the amount, the frequency of your data completely determines your business outcomes—if you are AI-first. That never happened in the world before. Today, if you—I’m sure you’ve experienced this—the quality of an output from an LLM is highly correlated to the input you give it. Some people who are good at prompts get a better answer versus some people who suck at prompts. And then you spend a lot of time crafting your prompt.

Abhi Sharma: So what we’re saying is: data is no longer inert. That’s number one. Number two: software is no longer tools that you program. Software has agency now because AI agents will make non-deterministic behaviors.

Abhi Sharma: So, when you combine one and two, what ends up happening is that observability, trust, visibility into your data, and accountability become foundational—not only for compliance and security, but for your customers to actually get the business outcome they want, for actually delivering what you want.

Abhi Sharma: Because of that change—and of course the undercurrent is AI—

Abhi Sharma: There used to be these siloed perspectives in organizations: DLP, data security posture management, compliance and GRC, data governance, or data catalog.

Abhi Sharma: All of these things are now converging into a singularity. Because if you look at the jobs to be done, what problems are the people in these roles trying to solve? 95% of it is the same.

Abhi Sharma: So at Reliance, we took an AI-native approach—kind of counterintuitive—but we built a platform from day one for these things.

Abhi Sharma: It took a while for people to realize: why are you trying to do so many things? The industry advice for startups is, focus on one thing, get exceptionally good at it, then scale up.

Abhi Sharma: But we realized that five or six years from now, if we didn’t build a strong foundation, this convergence would happen and we wouldn’t be in the best position to serve our customers. So we took this position of solving the hardest problems.

Abhi Sharma: And they’re also very correlated problems, because it’s all about the data now. Your data—its quality, its protection, its frequency, its distribution—will directly determine your business outcomes.

Abhi Sharma: And we’re here to help our customers trust it, protect it, and govern it, so they can run their business while we handle all the other stuff.

Alejandro Cremades: And we were talking about the future, but I want to talk about the past now with a lesson of reflection. After having done two startups and with the wealth of knowledge that you have, Abhi—if I was to put you into a time machine and let’s say I put you in front of the younger Abhi coming out of AppDynamics—and you’re able to give your younger self one piece of advice for launching a company, what would that be and why, given what you know now?

Abhi Sharma: I think the one piece of advice I’d give is: make sure that you craft and build every piece of whatever you’re building within the company with high degrees of intention.

Abhi Sharma: And I think this goes back to the point I made before—where I didn’t build a great recruiting or hiring machine early on, and then we suffered from that.

Abhi Sharma: The second piece would be: as a founder, when you start and build a company, your number one job becomes to get exceptionally good at all kinds of things at the company—and be an absolute truth-seeking product-market-fit machine.

Abhi Sharma: And you have to do that every time and keep reinventing yourself. So those are the two pieces of advice I’d give myself. I think I would still start companies—so that part is good. But those are the two things where I could avoid certain mistakes.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. Abhi, for the people that are listening and who want to reach out and say hi or learn more about Reliance, what is the best way for them to do so?

Abhi Sharma: Well, you can find Reliance on reliance.ai—R-E-L-Y-A-N-C-E dot AI. And then for me, you can look up Abhi Sharma on LinkedIn and DM me—I’m happy to respond.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Abhi, thank you so much for being on The DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Abhi Sharma: Thank you so much, Alejandro. Pleasure to chat with you.

*****

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