Recall Sessions: How Moveworks Went From First Customer to $2.85B with Bhavin Shah

I'm Sharman Yogi, and I'm guest hosting a new series for the Village Global podcast called Recall Sessions. Everyone talks about product, but I wanna talk about something that doesn't get enough attention, go to market. Specifically, how do the world's most successful companies get their first customers? I'll be sitting down with founders and operators of billion dollar companies to hear the real story, not the polished version where everything just clicked, the messy version, the cold emails, the first deals, the selling before the product was even ready. My guest today is Bhavin Shah, senior vice president and general manager of Moveworks and AI at ServiceNow. Bhavin was the founding CEO of Moveworks, an agentic AI platform that helps organizations automate workflows and boost productivity across the enterprise. Over 350 companies and over 5,500,000 employees rely on it, including Toyota, Siemens, and Unilever. In December 2025, ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for 2,850,000,000.00. Prior to Moveworks, Bhaven founded Refresh, a professional insights platform that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2015. Before that, he led global projects at LeapFrog, expanding educational technology to children worldwide. We're going to go back to the early days before Moveworks became Moveworks. Let's get into it. So how did we meet? You know, it's a great question. I think I emailed you. I think I emailed you, and as, like, '20 when did you find Refresh? Oh, gosh. 2012. 2012. Yeah. Spring. Okay. So I think I emailed you around the same time because we're both working on mobile productivity, and I was coming from a different perspective. And and then, I was just curious, like, what your point of view is. And then you sold to LinkedIn when? 2015. 2015. Okay. And then when did you and what one oh, wow. One year later, founded Moveworks. Mhmm. How long did you stay at LinkedIn? LinkedIn, I didn't stay. So it was it was part of the transition Okay. Once we got everything kind of settled. Okay. You know, the option there was to sort of go on and become, like, a product manager and, you know, do that kind of kind of role. But, I still knew, that I had it in me to do another company. And Jeff was great just in talking to him about, you know, what what we wanted to do. They wanted to bring some of the refresh technology into the, you know, LinkedIn app and explore new ways that they could, you know, bring value to their users. And so it made a lot of sense Mhmm. For the acquisition, but, not as much for myself. And so, I took the pass to go, and, I told myself I'd take about a year to kind of, you know, explore things. And lo and behold, six months later, I was exploring ideas and Here we go. You know, yeah, navigating a whole bunch of new new things. So I've been wanting to chat with you about the history and …