Automating Software and Success: MS/MBA alum’s start-up achieves billion-dollar valuation

Sid Pardeshi knew about the potential of artificial intelligence long before he joined the MS/MBA program co-run by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Harvard Business School (HBS). He spent six years as a software engineer and architect at NVIDIA, where he designed and patented over 27 AI-related tools and products in an era when terms like “large language model” (LLM), “chatbot” and “generative AI” weren’t part of the general lexicon. His experiences taught him how mechanical software design can be, and how many of its most tedious, repetitive elements could be replaced by AI.

“Software traditionally had to be written using a large number of people,” he said. “It's kind of like a conveyor belt process, where you have requirements, then you have developers implementing the solution. And then you go through code review and testing and all of that work to finally be able to gain confidence to push something into production and client-facing usage.

“We were able to see quite early that the LLMs will eventually get better enough to be able to write a lot of code at once, validate the code autonomously, and produce really high-quality results.”

Pardeshi, MS/MBA '24, made it clear in his Harvard application that he wanted to build a more efficient approach to software engineering. While here, he met HBS student Brian Elliott, and the two began working on their solution: an autonomous software development platform. They named the platform Blitzy, inspired by the term “blitzscaling,” an approach to extremely rapid business growth they studied while at Harvard.

The name proved to be prophetic. In its first three years, the Cambridge-based start-up has already grown to 80 employees and been named a local AI technology company to watch by the Boston Business Journal. It recently announced a funding round of $200 million at a $1.4 billion valuation. It’s the second “unicorn” – companies valued at over $1 billion – founded by an MS/MBA alum. The first unicorn, Nominal, offers an AI-driven data analytics platform for aerospace, defense and industrial engineering.

“It really feels like it is just the beginning,” said Pardeshi, who serves as Chief Technology Officer. “This is a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to really transform the space of software development. We feel incredibly grateful that we've had this opportunity, and we want to do everything to make the most of it.”

Blitzy’s mission, as Pardeshi describes it, is “100% autonomy in software development.” Their platform writes code, tests it, finds security vulnerabilities, fixes errors and generates progress reports. When properly integrated into a company, it frees up the human software engineers to focus on the areas Blitzy can’t automate, such as conceptualization, specification of programming needs and long-term software strategy.

“If you consider a project has 100 hours of work needed, Blitzy is able to reliably complete at least 80 of those hours, so humans can do a lot more and focus on far more complicated problems,” he said.

With this latest fundraising round, Pardeshi plans to continue Blitzy’s rapid growth. He hopes to expand the company size to over 300 employees, while expanding partnerships with labs and cloud service providers.

“A lot of the work that Blitzy does is tied to the forward-deployed engineer motion, where we have engineers that are deployed to client companies, and they're helping the company accelerate the impact that Blitzy has,” he said. “We're looking to do that with a lot more companies. And from a product standpoint, we have some really exciting features that we're now going to be able to ship far quicker, far more reliably with enterprise-grade and scale quality and reliability.”

Blitzy’s success is very much a success story for Harvard and the MS/MBA program as well. The company was born out of a class called “Launching Tech Ventures in the Age of AI,” and later became Pardeshi’s capstone project. He and Elliott developed it at the Harvard Innovation Labs. It was named a semifinalist in the 2024 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, and the co-founders’ first client was a company they met through their classes. 

“This could not have been a deeper Harvard story than it already is,” he said.