Akash Ganapathi

Akash Ganapathi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Opine, an AI platform that converges scattered sales information into a single intelligence and automation layer for technical sales teams and complex revenue operations. A two-time AI founder, he left the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to start his first company, then helped build cybersecurity firm JupiterOne, where he led presales and post-sales globally through their $1.1B valuation. There he met his co-founders Austin Kelleher and Charlie Duong, leaving together in 2023 to start Opine.

Let's start with your story. Where were you born, and what was it like growing up?

I've been into computers since I was young and I credit my parents for it! They are both software engineers. We had a computer in the house when I was three, which was not common back then. Instead of playing with toys, I would play silly games on the computer that my dad coded. I was building websites when I was eleven, and my love for the SaaS industry followed from there.

My path to entrepreneurship was more of a personality thing. Though I'd interned at several great companies in college, I wanted to own bigger problems. We also were not learning AI in college back then, so I had to teach myself what I know from scratch. That feeling built until 2013 when I decided to leave college to start my first AI company. The whole thing was a labor of love for solving hard problems, and I felt ready to take the risk.

Though I don't regret it at all, that decision was optimizing for more than just money!

What do you and your co-founders plan to take with you from JupiterOne and what are you looking to do differently at Opine?

JupiterOne was a formative time for me and my co-founders. They were employees two and three, while I was the first solutions architect. It was later that I led the pre-sales and post-sales team globally until we left to start Opine.

One thing I always say is that the mistakes you can make building a startup are highly transferable. What not to do is almost always true, but what "to do" changes constantly and winning playbooks decay over time as more people copy them, resulting in diminishing returns. That's the hardest part of running a company.

At JupiterOne, the founder was a real visionary. Almost all of his predictions for the industry came true in some form. He had an incredible amount of charisma, and was willing to roll up his sleeves for customers himself. He could energize the entire company in an instant. We saw a great customer obsessed culture come out of that, and that is something we try to emulate today.

We also learned the difficulty of balancing a big vision with customer requests. You have to know when to narrow the scope to stay aligned with your customers, but also when to ignore your customers' opinions to build something better than they can even imagine.

What's a moment early in your career-a win or a failure-that you still carry with you as a founder?

My first company was not a "success" for various reasons, so I carry that with me. One of the things I learned the hard way is that you are not just competing with your peers, you're competing with the free market. We're all so used to comparing our skills against classmates or colleagues of a similar age or level. But as a founder, I realized my direct competition could be a Harvard MBA with ten or fifteen years of industry experience in my space.

My cofounder Austin and I often say the best startups are full of dissatisfied people with chips on their shoulders. If you are proud of everything you've achieved and are doing, why would you want to be at a young startup? You do it because you have a mission or something to prove.

Enterprise sales for many teams feel scattered and broken-CRMs, spreadsheets, Slack channels, and tribal knowledge. Why has a real "fix" taken this long?

Consolidation to the simplest set of tools is basically human nature. It sounds trite, but AI is going to cause a lot more consolidation for three reasons.

The first is retrieval-today we can find information with natural-language. You can search a database without knowing a query language. You can search large corpuses of unstructured data, and get cited results. That's huge for aggregating and making sense of all the context that normally gets trapped and siloed.

The second is generation-because you have richer context, now it can be organized and pattern matched. So, you can finally automate subjective and nuanced reports, documents, analyses, and processes in an accurate way, instead of just following a surface level template or rigid workflow. This allows more teams to operate out of a single platform.

The third is user experience. People tend to oversimplify this, but I'm not just talking about AI chat experiences. The reason we have so many siloed tools is because people work in different ways. Now each user can customize their experiences easily. They can get deal summaries, meeting preps, reports, and even tweak whole UIs to their liking; in whatever style or language they prefer. For example, someone in Spain can say, 'I want to read all of this in Spanish,' and switch it all in a heartbeat. What's incredible is that for the first time, that kind of customization isn't something that engineering has to plan or build for months; it's happening organically and on the user's terms.

Where does the most money quietly leak out of an enterprise revenue process and are you 'pro human in the loop,' or do you think AI eventually runs the whole cycle?

Driving velocity comes from either increasing ACVs, decreasing sales cycles, improving win rates, or increasing the number of opportunities. AI can definitely help improve these factors by identifying and qualifying opportunities, strategizing against competitors and comparing prior deals, automating time-consuming admin tasks and keeping stakeholders in the loop, keeping sellers and leaders prepared, scanning for risks, etc. We like to focus on the technical sales process and the subject matter experts required to close a deal and deliver value. They are always an underserved team. Similar to engineering, we see sales teams being massively augmented by AI, but it's too risky to just set and forget in production. When so many things are changing, human creativity is more important than ever to win deals. There's no data to train on.

Until we see buyers become AI, human sellers aren't going anywhere. Some non-software markets with a lot of competition will get to that point sooner than others, the ones where the problems are similar, the products are fungible, and negotiations happen over the phone.

Most tools in this space try to replace the CRM, but Opine sits on top. Why?

I'll talk about it from the product side. Trying to be the CRM is a bottoms-up game where you're competing with HubSpot's free tier, and the real value we wanted to provide was through a context and visibility layer. So, we committed to solving data and visibility problems, and instead of trying to solve it for everyone, we decided to focus on companies selling technical products with a complex sales motion. This focus lets us credibly say our customer context layer is the best one for that kind of company.

That's why tapping into the CRM became our natural choice; we can't replace a thirty-year-old system of record, so we enrich it instead. We analyze the unstructured sources Salesforce doesn't handle well, adopt the same security and permission standards, and layer on focused context and agent tools like alerting on risks, tracking customer requests, preparing for meetings, win-loss analysis, activity tracking, scoring fit, CRM hygiene, and more so customers can get really creative.

Are customers using Opine in ways you didn't anticipate?

Yes. We started very focused on sales engineers and solutions engineers responsible for a black-box process-managing pilots, proofs of concept, proofs of value. The whole idea was to give visibility into sales processes, shorten sales cycles, and improve win rates, like I mentioned earlier.

Our customers took that and expanded on it. They told us, 'Actually, a lot of our revenue operations are black boxes, not just the POCs.' There are post-sales implementation processes nobody has eyes on, and early-stage deals after the demo but before the POC where our context is extremely helpful for prep and handoff. What we didn't expect is that people are now building totally custom software on top of our data. They use our MCP, pull it into Claude, and have Claude code new applications, folding it into their engineering teams so the customer context is right there alongside their coding agents. We bet on that years ago, but I don't think anyone anticipated how easy it would be to pull our context into other agents and systems.

What's something true about building a company that nobody tells you until you're in it?

Your co-founders really matter, more than almost anything. At Opine, the founding team is probably the strongest thing about us. The three of us have the right balance and overlap in skills, so we push each other when needed, and we all own things only we can do. Having a strong foundation is extremely literal in this case.

If you could press a 'relax' button and be swept off anywhere in the world, where would you go?

It depends whether time actually stops. If it does, I'd just be in my basement with my wife and daughter-having dinner, playing, and using the additional time to reconnect. We find time for this every day, but it's never enough.

If it's a real trip, I'd teleport to Japan with my wife and daughter. My wife is half-Japanese and I haven't been yet, but it's hard to find time to go!