The article tells the journey of serial entrepreneur Bhavin Shah, from educational games to contact intelligence software Refresh to enterprise service support platform Moveworks, and was finally acquired by ServiceNow for $2.85 billion, providing a reference for domestic to B software entrepreneurs.
In July 2023, Machinery Industry published a book called “The Exit Mechanism of Startups”, which is about how entrepreneurs sell a startup.
The book did not attract much attention, and until today, it has not been able to display the rating on Douban because the number of evaluators is insufficient.
This is an underrated book, at least at this stage, many domestic to B software entrepreneurs are considering how to go ashore, whether it is going public or being acquired, exit is already a topic on the table.
The author, Alejandro Cremades, is an investment banker, lawyer, and serial entrepreneur whose clients are small and medium-sized companies looking for M&A and financing services.
Impressively, in August 2024, Kremedes interviewed a serial entrepreneur – Bhavin Shah, founder and CEO of Moveworks, through his podcast “DealMakers.”
Bhavin Shah has lived in Silicon Valley since he was three years old, assembling computers such as the Pentium 386 in the fifth and sixth grades of elementary school, and was also selected by the school to have breakfast with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. After graduating from Stanford graduate school, Bhavin joined LeapFrog, a start-up toy company with only 70 employees at the time.
The company expanded rapidly, listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2002 and increasing its workforce to 1,200. At LeapFrog, he has gained valuable experience from product management to business development.
Bhavin chose educational games for his first venture, but the results did not meet expectations. He found that running a company was far more complicated than he imagined, and he had shortcomings in financing, management, and organizational culture construction.
In 2011, Bhavin Shah co-founded the contact intelligence software “Refresh” with Paul Tyma. It’s an iOS app that integrates data from users’ social media, emails, calendars, and more to provide predictive insights before meetings. They received about $10 million in early investment from venture capital firms.
In 2014, Refresh launched the Enterprise Edition product on the Salesforce AppExchange to deepen the integration of the sales process. In 2015, the fifth year of Refresh’s founding, the company was acquired by LinkedIn. After the acquisition, 12 core employees joined the LinkedIn team.
Bhavin Shah, founder and CEO of Moveworks
In 2016, the year after Bhavin sold his intelligence software, he founded Moveworks, an AI-powered enterprise service enablement platform that helps organizations automate internal service requests such as IT support, human resources, facilities management, and more.
Moveworks continues Bhavin’s exploration of “data-driven relationships” and focuses more on on-premises service scenarios than Refresh.
In this 2024 interview with DealMakers podcast, Bhavin specifically talks about the long-termism of to B entrepreneurship: “Building something that matters takes time, and it requires dedication and long-term persistence. ”
And how long to persist is considered long-term, Bhavin believes that “it usually takes more than 7 years”.
Coincidentally, just seven months after the podcast aired, in March 2025, ServiceNow officially announced the $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks.
At this point, exactly 10 years after Bhavin sold his previous company, Bhavin was once again successfully landed.
01 Make up for shortcomings: a win-win merger and acquisition
In November 2019, former legendary SAP CEO Bill McDermott joined ServiceNow as CEO. His philosophy is that the enterprise software of the future must think like a human.
Based on this concept, ServiceNow, a SaaS giant with a market capitalization of more than $100 billion, has been increasing its AI layout over the years.
In 2023, the company partnered with NVIDIA to develop enterprise-grade AIGC tools, and in 2024, it launched Now Assist, an AI feature suite, which became the fastest-growing product in the company’s history. As of the end of December 2024, nearly 1,000 customers have signed up for the product, achieving an annual contract value of more than $200 million for AI products.
However, ServiceNow’s AI agents are mainly used to automate specific back-end tasks and favor process automation, while Moveworks is an excellent front-end AI assistant that can be directly integrated into collaboration tools such as Slack and Teams, covering HR, IT, finance, and other scenarios, and can perform a variety of different tasks. The same interface, both for those who make task requests and for those who are usually responsible for fulfilling them.
This broad reach of the workforce is attractive to ServiceNow, bridging ServiceNow’s shortcomings in conversational AI and end-to-end task processing, enabling ServiceNow to form full-stack capabilities from process design, automated execution, to intelligent decision-making.
Today, more than 350 large enterprises and more than 5 million employees use Moveworks, including 10% of Fortune 500 companies. Its customers include Hearst, Instacart, Palo Alto Networks, Siemens, Toyota, and Unilever, among others.
Moveworks’ performance is also impressive.
According to figures released in September 2024, the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeded $100 million and raised $315 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion, with investors including Bain Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Tiger Global Fund, and others.
For Bhavin, Moveworks’ move is just one part of his entrepreneurial journey. On the other hand, the domestic to-B software market, especially entrepreneurs with dreams of ringing bells, find it difficult to accept the outcome of selling their businesses midway, and Bhavin’s approach is a reference.
02 Functional matrix and application scenarios
Bhavin found a common underlying problem in business operations – resolving routine support requests wasted a lot of time.
With the rise of platforms like Slack, Teams, and WhatsApp, which have seen a profound transformation in corporate communication tools and people are more inclined to work efficiently, Bhavin and they chose to launch a project on Slack to build an AI assistant.
Moveworks’ main products
Moveworks is like an “all-in-one AI butler” hidden in enterprise communication tools, able to understand employees’ various requests and solve problems in seconds.
Bhavin defines their product as a generative AI super app that allows users to access various systems, and Bhavin emphasizes that it is a super app that remains neutral. Its core functions and application scenarios are:
1 Cross-departmental intelligent support
Integrate IT, HR, finance, sales, and other department systems, handle multilingual requests through natural language understanding (NLP), and support financial transactions such as payroll inquiries.
In addition, it also provides the “Copilot” function, which uses large language models (LLMs) to build multi-step plans to solve problems, such as automated ticket creation, approval process acceleration, etc.
Looking for a contract, checking the process, and approving an application? It can accurately find needles from hundreds of systems, which is much easier than finding needles in a haystack; New colleagues lost? Policy consultation swiping? AI incarnates as a “humanoid Siri”, and even saves the coffee time of the HR lady, after all, AI can be much better than human memory in answering social security questions; The contract expiration reminder is more punctual than birthday wishes, customer information is retrieved in seconds, and even the name of the customer’s pet is remembered, although it will not help the customer walk the dog for the time being.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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2 Automation and integration capabilities
Creator Studio allows developers to customize conversational AI use cases, streamlining complex workflows. Natively integrate with hundreds of enterprise systems such as ITSM, ERP, Slack, Microsoft Teams, enabling task automation (e.g., software configuration, facility requests) and cross-system data fusion.
Whether you’re messaging in Slack or typing in Teams, it understands requests mixed with industry slang. For example, if a manufacturing employee says, “The production line is stuck and needs approval,” it can instantly retrieve ERP data and push it to the supervisor to complete the process in minutes.
3 Knowledge management and predictive analysis
Integrate disparate enterprise knowledge bases and public data sources to generate real-time knowledge fragments and close the self-service information gap.
4 Data analysis and insights
Copilot Insights and Employee Experience Insights analytics support efficiency and employee needs, generating a backlog that optimizes service delivery.
As a generative AI super application, it has cross-departmental intelligent support and automation integration capabilities, which can not only integrate multi-departmental systems to efficiently handle various requests and optimize processes, but also realize developer customization and multi-system integration, and comprehensively improve enterprise operational efficiency.
03 Anchor pricing: build a commercial moat
As a leading company integrating enterprise-level AI and SaaS, Moveworks’ business model revolves around subscription-based charging + in-depth customization of vertical scenarios + ecological cooperation-driven.
Its charging model, the core logic is dynamic pricing based on enterprise needs.
Its subscription (SaaS model) is based on an annual or multi-year contract, with combined pricing based on enterprise size (number of employees), functional modules (e.g., IT support, HR, sales automation, etc.), and usage (e.g., number of AI calls). For example, some Fortune 500 clients typically pay millions of dollars in annual fees.
Moveworks also sets consumption tiers, providing low-barrier “pay-as-you-go” options (such as billing per AI service call) for small and medium-sized enterprises to reduce initial investment risk; There are also some additional fees in the form of value-added fees, including data integration (such as deep integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams), customized training models, dedicated technical support, etc.
It is worth mentioning that Moveworks has layered target customers, and large enterprise customers are connected by the Moveworks direct sales team to provide highly customized services (such as exclusive AI model training, deep system integration), and the contract amount is usually at the level of one million dollars, using a subscription system + customized fee model.
SMB customers offer standardized packages (e.g., 1000~2500 users for $150 per person per year) through AWS Marketplace, lowering the purchase threshold and meeting lightweight needs.
The reason for the stratification of target customers is nothing more than the long sales cycle of major customers, complex negotiations, and a lot of resources need to be invested. AWS channels can reach the long-tail market of small and medium-sized customers, and the Marketplace has millions of enterprise users visiting traffic every month, so Moveworks can reach potential customers at a lower cost than self-built channels without directly investing in sales manpower.
With no public price list on Moveworks’ website, potential customers need to get custom quotes through the sales team, and this opaque quoting strategy gives the company’s team room to negotiate with major customers.
It is not easy to set a fair price for a SaaS product that everyone agrees on, after all, different enterprises will have different customer sizes, functional modules, deployment methods, etc. Here, it is essential to mention one of Moveworks’ core pricing strategies – industry anchor pricing.
This is a widely used price psychological warfare strategy in the SaaS field, providing enterprise customers with benchmarkable cost benchmarks through standardized cost models released by third-party organizations, reducing friction in price negotiations.
For example, Forrester’s composite organizational model makes hidden costs such as internal development and training explicit, forming a transparent reference point.
It compares Moveworks’ subscription fees to the cost of a similar customer’s own system to highlight the ROI difference. Forrester estimates that using Moveworks can save $11.5 million in costs over three years.
Judging from the comparison of Moveworks anchor pricing and Microsoft Copilot pricing, Moveworks’ anchor pricing strategy has built a more robust pricing moat than giants such as Microsoft through full cost transparency and risk-sharing mechanisms.
Let’s look at how anchor pricing supports Moveworks’ business logic.
It transforms abstract AI capabilities into quantifiable cost savings, solving the barriers to technical value perception for enterprise customers in procurement.
In terms of competitive defense, through Forrester’s third-party endorsement, the cognitive barrier of “lowest total cost” is established to resist the impact of low-priced competitors;
In addition, the anchor pricing model can be quickly replicated to new industries, generating new benchmarks by simply adjusting the industry coefficients.
In the future, as generative AI becomes more popular, Moveworks may need to introduce dynamic anchor pricing, such as floating pricing based on AI resolution rates. However, its core logic will not change, that is, reducing decision-making friction through standardized models, which is still an important law for to B software companies.
Serial entrepreneurs like Bhavin would be the ideal type for investors. In fact, investors prefer to cultivate a healthy M&A market for domestic to B software.
The most important thing the software industry should do is to merge similar items of mergers and acquisitions, support the merger of the same industry or adjacent industries, accelerate the independent listing process through mergers and acquisitions, and open the valuation ceiling. It is also the fastest, most feasible and most profitable exit method for investors.
