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Suhail Doshi is a software engineer and tech entrepreneur known for founding Mixpanel, Mighty Computing, and Playground AI. Doshi grew up in Arizona. He is a self-taught programmer who majored in computer systems engineering at Arizona State University until dropping out to join the Y Combinator startup accelerator program in 2009. In 2013, he was named in Forbes' 30 under 30.
In 2009, at age twenty, Doshi started the San Francisco-based tech company MixPanel with cofounder Tim Trefren. The idea for the company came to Doshi while interning at Slide, a now-defunct company headed by PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, who went on to become a seed investor in Mixpanel. Doshi saw the value of Slide's in-house analytics tools and noticed similar companies were building their own versions. Mixpanel provides analytics tools for mobile and web apps to track how users are using software products. Doshi became CEO of the new company.
After a financing round from Andreessen Horowitz in 2014, Mixpanel was valued at over $800 million. The company's early business plan included primarily serving small- and medium-sized businesses and other Y Combinator grads with analytics software. However, in 2016, the company pivoted to focus on selling to bigger clients and cut nineteen jobs, close to 10 percent of its workforce at the time.
In 2018, Doshi stepped down as CEO of Mixpanel, stating “I just need a break." Doshi remained involved, becoming the chairman of the company's board. When Doshi stepped down, the company had grown to over 300 employees and raised $77 million from investors. He was replaced as CEO by Amir Movafaghi, a former Twitter executive. At the time, Movafaghi stated the company was close to $100 million in annual revenue, half of which comes from companies with more than 1,000 employees, including BMW, Intuit, Samsung, and Uber.
In April 2019, Doshi started Mighty, a new company that aims to make Google Chrome faster by streaming it from a more powerful computer in the cloud. In November 2022, three and half years after starting Mighty, Doshi announced he would stop working on the company and that its team would begin working on building new kinds of creative tools using advances in AI. Doshi referred to technological challenges in the company's aim when announcing the pivot to new products. He also stated that Mighty had 50% of all money raised remaining.
In November 2022, Doshi announced the new company, Playground AI, which would go on to develop an image editor combining AI research and product design to let users create graphics. Playground AI has raised $40.8M in funding. Upon the announcement of the funding, the company laid out a ten-year plan, including the following:
1. Develop a modern graphics editor that can achieve new state-of-the-art capabilities 2. Fund and advance state-of-the-art research in computer vision 3. Build a range of multi-task models that can edit, create, and understand pixels 4. Enable 10x more of humanity to create things that they previously didn't possess the skills to do