"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."
— Venkat Thiruvengadam, CEO of DuploCloud
The traditional moat of SaaS is under siege.
For years, SaaS companies have built defensibility through finely tuned workflows and user experiences that make switching costs high. You learn the system. Your team adapts. The data is integrated. And slowly, that product becomes irreplaceable, not necessarily because it’s the best, but because it’s entrenched.
Then came AI.
In a recent episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, DuploCloud founder and CEO Venkat Thiruvengadam sat down with host Alex Theuma to share how AI is reshaping not only the DevOps space but the very foundations of SaaS software itself.
And Venkat’s take is clear: if SaaS companies don’t reinvent themselves as AI-native, they risk becoming obsolete.
From Azure’s Early Days to Founding DuploCloud
Venkat isn’t new to paradigm shifts. As an early engineer at Microsoft Research, he was part of the team that would go on to build Azure. This was well before the term "cloud computing" became commonplace.
That experience, helping transition enterprise infrastructure to the cloud, planted the seeds for DuploCloud’s founding.
When Venkat moved to the Bay Area, he noticed something strange.
Despite advances in cloud platforms, many startups still rely on:
- Bloated DevOps teams
- Manual infrastructure setup
- Inefficient handoffs between dev and ops
Compared to hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon, the contrast was glaring.
So he asked a simple question:
“What if DevOps could be delivered as a service, just like the cloud itself?”
That insight became DuploCloud:.
A DevOps AI and automation platform that enables small and mid-sized teams to manage secure, compliant infrastructure without hiring a full DevOps team.
Bootstrapped Foundations, Venture-Backed Scale
Before raising $50M across three rounds, DuploCloud quietly bootstrapped its way to $1M in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)..
Venkat built the first version himself with a small team of engineers. That deliberate pace gave the company time to refine a few things.
- Its ideal customer profile: startups and SMBs with high compliance needs
- Its messaging: compliance is existential, automation is optimization
- Its an early go-to-market motion
Once product-market fit clicked, DuploCloud scaled quickly. It fortunately had help from backers like Mayfield and Montarista Ventures. Both brought capital and deep GTM expertise.
Today, the company boasts 150+ employees across the U.S. and India.
It also prides itself on a rapidly growing customer base of startups and mid-sized companies. Each one is automating their infrastructure, security, and compliance operations.
Why AI Is More Than a Feature. It’s a Replatforming Moment.
While many SaaS companies are adding AI features, DuploCloud is replatforming its experience around AI.
Venkat sees this move as inevitable for all SaaS companies..
Most SaaS products rely on a UI layer of menus, dashboards, and wizards that users have to learn.
This becomes the moat: switching away means retraining your team and changing your habits. But AI erases that barrier.
“With AI,” Venkat explains, “the user experience becomes English-in, English-out. You don’t need to learn how to navigate a dashboard to get insights or take action. You just ask.”
That shift breaks traditional UX-based defensibility wide open.
DuploCloud’s response? Embrace the change and turn it into an advantage.
By layering agentic AI on top of their already mature automation engine, DuploCloud allows teams to query, plan, and execute DevOps workflows in plain language.
And they can do it all without manual toil, without a full ops team, and without sacrificing security or compliance.
In Venkat’s words, “We already had the backend engine:
- The infrastructure automation
- The compliance enforcement
- The hundreds of workflows
Now we’re simply replacing the frontend interface with AI.”
What the Next Generation of SaaS Will Look Like
Not every company will survive this transition.
Venkat compares this moment to the on-prem → cloud shift. Companies that resisted the cloud were quickly replaced by those born into it. The same will be true of AI.
The next wave of winners won’t just add AI to existing workflows. They’ll rethink workflows entirely, embedding AI as the default interface, not an add-on.
For DuploCloud, that means AI agents who can reason across infrastructure, write compliant policies, orchestrate real deployments, and escalate with context. And they do it all while keeping humans in the loop.
Final Thoughts: From Founder's Fire to Product-Market Fit
Venkat closes the conversation with a candid take on the realities of building and scaling a company:
Being a founder means there’s always something broken. There’s always another fire to put out. But with a clear North Star, the right team, and conviction in the long-term platform shift, it’s possible to build something lasting.
AI is not a trend. It’s the next platform shift.
DuploCloud is betting the company on it… and reshaping DevOps in the process.
Listen to the full episode of the SaaS Revolution Show with Venkat Thiruvengadam here.
For more on how DuploCloud is using agentic AI to modernize DevOps, visit duplocloud.com.
