The problem has a name, and everyone in enterprise sales knows it

Picture an AE at quarter-end. She has a deal that's been in the works for three months. The customer is ready to sign. She logs into the CPQ to generate a quote and hits a loading screen. Then another. The deal structure she needs doesn't exist in the system, so she opens a ticket with deal desk. Deal desk comes back two days later with a quote that's wrong. She fixes it manually in a spreadsheet, routes it to her manager on Slack, then to finance, then to legal, then back to her manager. The customer has gone cold. The quarter closes without the deal.

It’s a story every seller knows well.

Enterprise sales teams have been living inside this system for over a decade. The tools haven't changed. The deals have — pricing has gone from a simple seat license to hundreds of SKUs, consumption-based contracts, usage models, and AI-based outcomes that shift every quarter. The complexity exploded. The software never caught up.

CIOs rank CPQ among their top operational pain points. Sales teams don't just dislike it. They have a name for it: Causes People to Quit.

Why nobody fixed it

This isn't a secret. It's just a problem nobody believed was solvable. Until recently, they were right.

The technology wasn't there. Pricing models were simpler. And the incumbent vendors had every incentive to patch and preserve rather than rebuild from scratch. So they layered configuration on top of configuration, added implementation partners, charged seven-figure rollout fees, and called it enterprise software.

The result is what Joubin spent the early part of his career navigating as an AE: custom Frankenstein systems that buckle under the weight of how modern deals actually get done. When he joined Kleiner Perkins as a Partner, he convened a group of 35 CIOs from companies like Netskope, Box, and Uber and asked what was most broken. Uniformly, all of them said the same thing: their sales leaders were being let down by the software they depended on to close deals.

Kleiner Perkins looked for a company solving it. They couldn't find one worth backing. So Joubin decided to build it.

The team we needed to actually solve it

Ajay and Eugene met their first day at Caltech (Ajay enrolled at 15) and have been building together ever since. They wrote software for the NASA Mars Rover. They went on to Robinhood and Meta. When they decided to start a company, they asked their founder friends what was most broken in their businesses. The answer, over and over, was CPQ. They didn't even know what CPQ was. Then they found out, and immediately understood why nobody had fixed it. The data model is fundamentally broken. You can't repair it by layering AI on top. You have to start over.

When they met Joubin, it was obvious: he had spent a career living inside the problem, and they had the engineering instincts to rebuild it the right way. Three months after incorporating, we had paid design partners. Six months after that, we had a generally available product with paying enterprise customers, including Qualtrics.

What we built

This is not a configuration problem. It's an architecture problem.

We built Roadrunner from scratch — a new data model designed for how enterprise deals actually work today. Using LLMs to reason across structured and unstructured data, Roadrunner turns a natural language prompt into a fully structured, policy-compliant quote in seconds. Multiple deal configurations. Real-time margin and commission visibility. Approvals that route automatically instead of dying in a Slack thread. A digital deal desk for every rep on the team.

We call it PQA: Prompt, Quote, Approve. Not an improvement on CPQ. The replacement.

We didn't build it from a whiteboard. We co-developed it alongside enterprise design partners who sat with us inside the exact workflows that were broken, building solutions that fit the reality of enterprise sales, not a sanitized version of it. Those partners are now among our paying customers.

What we're building toward

CPQ is the wedge. Quote-to-cash — pricing, quoting, approvals, billing, and everything that connects them — touches every dollar of revenue a company generates. It is the most consequential workflow in the enterprise, and it has never had a software company worthy of it.

The companies that win the next decade need to price and sell in ways that legacy systems were never built to handle. By collapsing what used to take days into seconds, and replacing brittle, rule-based systems with intelligent, adaptive ones, we believe Roadrunner can fundamentally change how companies close and recognize revenue. Solve this well enough and we earn the right to go solve the next one.

That is the company we are building.

Come build with us

Nobody who joined Roadrunner cared about CPQ before they found us. What they found was a genuinely hard problem that had never been solved for the people who hate it most — and a team that is the right combination of people to solve it.

Customers and candidates alike have already bet their careers on us. If that sounds like your kind of challenge, we're hiring.

Prompt. Quote. Approve. Revenue in motion.

— Joubin, Ajay, and Eugene