Ajay Agarwal

My first start-up was during my sophomore year in college. A classmate was starting a software company to help tech companies manage their quotes, proposals and contacts all in one database (sounds a lot like CRM!). I joined him and we scaled that business to $1M in revenue. He later dropped out and founded Trilogy Software, where I eventually joined him again as employee 18. I ran product and sales at Trilogy for eight years, until we reached $300M in revenue.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA. My parents were immigrants from India and moved to Pittsburgh (via the UK, where I was born) when I was one. They encouraged me to take risks and pursue something entrepreneurial.

What do you love about working for Bain Capital Ventures?

I love the team at BCV — why else would I have stayed for over 20 years?! It’s a group of incredible people who love technology, are passionate about startups and are tireless in their efforts to help our companies succeed. We truly operate as a team, which is unusual in the venture world. And the founders I work with notice this.

Do you have an investment ethos? Is there a portfolio company investment that exemplifies that ethos?

I love application software that has a core architectural advantage. The UIs, basic workflows and features of any application can be copied, but the best application companies have a technology moat, as well. Clari’s forecasting solution is based on a real-time ingestion system that captures signals from dozens of enterprise systems and normalizes them into a longitudinal view, allowing the AI engine to perform complex calculations that deliver forecasting insights. At Clockwise, the core system is designed to optimize thousands of calendars concurrently in order to dynamically adjust meetings to free up “focus time” for individual engineers and knowledge workers.