Village Global Podcast Recall Sessions: How Moveworks Went From First Customer to $2.85B with Bhavin Shah
Mar 11, 2026
Bhavin Shah, founder who built Moveworks into an agentic AI platform and later led its AI business at ServiceNow. He recounts forming a four‑founder team, validating the idea with 34+ CIO conversations, landing the first customer with a vision demo, choosing investors for domain expertise, and how ChatGPT forced a major platform rearchitecture and sped acquisition talks.
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Validate With Dozens Of Real CIO Conversations
- Validate market timing and demand by running repeated, structured conversations with buyers before committing; Bhavin and Vaibov did 34 CIO interviews with VC help.
- Lightspeed pushed them to keep testing until pattern and willingness to buy were consistent, which became their signal to start.
First Deal Closed On A Vision Demo
- Moveworks closed its first paid customer from a vision demo and charged $50K despite having minimal code.
- The team colocated near the customer, got contractor badges, and iterated in‑person to ship a deployable product within six months.
Stop With Only Vision Demos Build Tryable Prototypes
- Build a usable demo, not just a pitch; today buyers expect something they can try and deploy quickly.
- Bhavin warns that vision demos work less now because tooling makes realistic prototypes easy and expectations higher.