He Built And Exited Two $270+ Million Companies And Is Now Providing A Suite Of AI-Driven Tech Solutions To Enterprises

Tarun Raisoni is one of the rare “tier zero” founders who has not only built, scaled, and financed world-class businesses but also navigated them through full-cycle acquisition exits. Not once, but twice. He carries an aura not just of success, but of sustained, repeatable excellence.

And now, Tarun is back at it again, this time taking on the enterprise AI challenge with his newest venture, Gruve. In this engrossing interview, he talks about building a team and a culture around them to get them excited about the future he envisioned.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Early Roots: From Small-Town India to Silicon Valley

Tarun’s story begins in the U.S., but his formative years were spent in India, growing up in a close-knit, family-centered environment focused on learning. Like many in India at the time, he faced the societal push toward engineering or medicine.

Embracing his family’s engineering legacy, Tarun earned a degree in chemical engineering. He later transitioned to electrical engineering at the peak of the dot-com boom. This education would be beneficial in his career journey as he progressed.

Arriving in 1999, Tarun quickly realized the power of technology and shifted his focus at USC to pursue a master’s degree in electrical engineering.

That pivot led him to Cisco Systems, then the world’s largest networking company, where he spent a decade learning about culture, enterprise systems, sales, and scaling. “Cisco was like an industry of 200 companies. It was foundational for how I learned to think about growth and systems.”

Tarun started as a software engineer, but transitioned into pre-sales systems engineering and then into sales. Next, Emerson came along, offering him a role in the data center business, where he would manage some of their hyperscale or Web 2.0 customers in the Bay Area.

Enter Rahi Systems: Bootstrapping a Global Infrastructure Play

While at Emerson, working with tech giants like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon, a client casually mentioned an unmet need in the data center space. That lunch turned into a lightbulb moment and the genesis of Rahi Systems.

Rahi was designed to enable global enterprise clients to deploy a consistent, scalable data center infrastructure across multiple countries. This was 2012 when cloud computing was just emerging. As Tarun recalls, Google Cloud did not exist in its entirety at the time.

He recognized that it was the opportune time to kick off the idea. Despite challenges, Rahi, the data center builder, grew rapidly without raising a dime of outside capital.

“We bootstrapped it. Not because we didn’t want capital, but because no one wanted to fund us early. Once we hit 40% to 50% YoY growth, we never looked back,” Tarun reveals.

The Importance of Culture and People

Culture and people were the pillars of Rahi’s success. As Tarun sees it, people are the most critical asset in hyper-growth technology companies or companies that service technology companies.

People are on the team as partners and customers. Business is about people and how you bring them together. Rahi started with seven or eight people in its first year. Over the next ten years, it eventually grew to 1,200 employees globally.

Tarun opines that culture is the most important fabric that brings people together. The values of a company’s culture should be designed in a way that helps resolve conflicts typically arising between individuals.

At Rahi, they aligned the values of prioritizing their work with delivering to their customers, and then conducting all internal prioritization of the work. Culture flows from top down, Tarun strongly believes. The leadership must embody and demonstrate the values of the culture.

Only then will the entire organization embrace it. Empowerment goes bottom up. Empower the team at the bottom tier, at the most individual contributor level, and then that extends to the top. Tarun is all about getting the team excited about the execution and pushing toward the future.

In Parallel: Building ZPE Systems

While scaling Rahi, Tarun co-founded ZPE Systems, this time focused on software automation in data centers. Born from conversations with brilliant engineers at Emerson, ZPE developed software-defined infrastructure tools, scaling globally once again. And again, bootstrapped.

Tarun recalls how he drew on his experience and background with data centers. He was excited to write the first few checks to support the initiative and take it to market. He found the right co-founders to execute and scale ZPE.

As Tarun says, “The good part was it gave us a lot of exposure into how to build some world-class software for our companies.” Both ventures ultimately culminated in major exits:

• Rahi Systems was acquired by Wesco for $270M.
• ZPE Systems was acquired by Legrand for $295M.

“Once you’ve done it twice, people stop calling it luck. But it was always about building platforms that created real value,” Tarun recalls. Looking back at their reasons for the exit, he explains that after reaching a certain scale, they needed a larger platform to service and support customers.

Tarun also points out that he believes in equity sharing with the team, and after 10 years, a liquidity event was very desirable for them. Scaling and liquidity were the two aspects that prompted the exits.

Gruve: The Next Chapter in AI Enablement

Tarun could foresee that data centers would require a significant amount of power and energy, and he began to consider how to achieve this in a sustainable, scalable, and cost-efficient manner.

His first solution was to build a renewable energy company that could scale and support the energy demands of all aspects of electrification and digitization worldwide. Then, ChatGPT happened.

Rather than retire, Tarun spotted another seismic wave: enterprise AI. He took four months off to study renewable energy, sustainability, and AI trends at Stanford and envisioned a future where every company becomes an AI-driven company.

Tarun realized that enterprises will want to adopt AI over the next five to 10 years. Every company is a data company. Every company is a technology company. Every company will be an AI company. However, to become that AI company, enterprises will need considerable assistance.

Enterprises are very good at what they do, but they often need a lot of help building and leveraging their technology stack. Gruve was born to help enterprises adopt and operationalize AI, not with vague promises but with outcome-based pricing.

The Gruve Business Model and Funding Raised

Clients only pay when Gruve helps them deliver tangible results. It is an outcome-based model. “This isn’t services for the sake of services. This is technology that drives impact, and we get paid only when it works and we earn their trust,” Tarun says.

To deliver this outcome-based model, Gruve has utilized a significant amount of in-house AI to build its technology services. Next, they help customers create the AI technology fabric within their business, designed around the specific outcomes they are looking for.

To bring Gruve to life, Tarun raised funding, partnering with Mayfield and Cisco Investments, and chose other investors who could offer more than just capital: mentorship, networks, and deep enterprise understanding. These aspects are significantly more valuable than just capital.

Storytelling is everything that Tarun Raisoni was able to master. The key is being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

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The Future of AI, According to Raisoni

Tarun believes we are at a 1999-equivalent moment for AI. The tools are early, adoption is choppy, and failures are inevitable, but the transformation is irreversible. AI is poised to get democratized across the board through software, hardware, models, and business use cases.

As AI becomes increasingly democratized, its impact will become more pervasive. Tarun points out that we are in the same cycle today with AI, where 75% to 80% of AI projects transition from pilot to failure. However, they don’t progress to the next phase. All that is set to change.

As enterprises undergo the AI growth spurt, they will also realize the elements they need to build around it, such as trust, governance, guardrails, and data safeguarding. Gruve is ready to help support these requirements. It is poised to help them through that journey with top talent.

Tarun foresees exceptional triple-digit growth within the business today, thanks to its robust foundation. He hopes Gruve will be able to showcase tremendous outcomes to its customers, who will be significantly more advantaged in their industry. Tarun wants Gruve to be that differentiator.

Final Advice: Be Bold, Take Risks

Reflecting on his journey, Tarun shared one piece of advice he’d give his younger self: “Be more bold. Take more risks. And never have regrets.”

From small-town India to Silicon Valley exits, and now building in the AI frontier, Tarun Raisoni exemplifies what it means to bet on your instincts, build for the long term, and continue innovating, even after the big wins.

Stay tuned. Gruve might just be his boldest chapter yet.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Bootstrapping isn’t a limitation, it can be a launchpad. Rahi and ZPE scaled globally before raising a dollar.
• People and culture are the true scale enablers. Leadership must live the culture for it to cascade.
• Exits should serve both vision and team. Liquidity is not just about founders; it’s about rewarding long-time team members.
• Spotting trends early is a competitive advantage. Whether cloud, data centers, or AI, timing and insight matter.
• Outcome-based pricing is the future of enterprise tech services. Performance must justify spend in the age of ROI accountability.
• Strategic investors bring more than capital. The right partners offer domain expertise, credibility, and access, thus multiplying a startup’s execution potential far beyond just financial support.
• Founders don’t retire — they retool. After two major exits, Tarun chose to study, reflect, and re-enter the arena with a sharper lens and bolder vision, proving that passion, not profit, drives the best entrepreneurs.

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