Joubin Mirzadegan will straight-up tell you: it’s boring—and that’s the point.
Mirzadegan’s startup Roadrunner builds AI-native, natural-language “configure, price, quote” (or CPQ) software. And before you keep scrolling, consider: The CPQ process—the software companies use to configure what they’re selling, set the right price, and generate a quote—quietly controls how fast and how well they can turn complex deals and new pricing ideas into actual revenue.
“I say this all the time internally: our ambition is to build a $10 billion company that we’re proud of,” said Mirzadegan. “And our vehicle to do that is CPQ and, more broadly, the whole quote-to-cash space. It’s the vessel with which we want to build a big company.”
Roadrunner—cofounded in 2025 by Mirzadegan, Ajay Natarajan, and Eugene Shao—has the distinction of being Kleiner Perkins’s first incubation since Glean, founded via the legendary VC firm’s Sand Hill Road office and now worth $7.2 billion. Mirzadegan was a partner at Kleiner when he pitched the idea to his boss, Mamoon Hamid.
“Literally, as he came to our one-on-one, Joubin said: ‘I think I’m ready to start a company, I vibe-coded this over the weekend, and this is what it’s going to look like,’” Hamid told Fortune. “[Early on] CROs told us, ‘if you build this for me, I’ll buy from you.’ So, we built the prototype and within three months closed our first seven-figure deal.”
Mirzadegan is still a partner at Kleiner, and the CEO at Roadrunner. The company’s now disclosing funding for the first time to Fortune. Roadrunner’s raised a total of $27 million, including a seed round led by Kleiner and Hamid and a Series A led by Founders Fund. Trae Stephens, partner at Founders Fund and cofounder of Anduril, will join Roadrunner’s board.
“Some things are unique and have a natural moat because they’re super controversial,” said Stephens. “There are other things that have a unique, natural moat because they’re boring. And if a really charismatic person wants to work on the less sexy areas of business, you can build huge businesses with that as your moat.”
CPQ may be boring, but it’s also hard, a problem at the intersection of complex pricing, chaotic org charts, and fossilized software. And over time, there have been more and more ways to price. Historically, pricing was more like a streaming subscription plan: a finite number of tiers, (relatively) static prices. Not so anymore.
“Pricing models have had this Cambrian explosion,” said Mirzadegan. “Now, [with AI] you have all of these new ways of using products and the ways that those products are being priced now [from usage-based to seat-based pricing] do not work with the underlying data models of the previous CPQ solutions.”
In short: Mirzadegan believes CPQ software just wasn’t built for this level of complexity, and believes Roadrunner can pioneer a new system he calls PQA, or “prompt, quote, approve.” In short, you prompt the system, it generates the quote, and uses AI to manage the approval process. And to Hamid’s point, lots of people have to do this.
“Think of it like consumer transactions—credit card companies make 2% to 3% on that transaction, so they can facilitate the payment,” said Hamid. “If you extend that to Roadrunner: we’re going to be that layer that helps you quickly negotiate deal terms and get you all the way to collecting cash faster. How much is that worth? This market is a blue ocean.”
I don’t know if I’ve ever had more people point-blank tell me: This is boring, but it’ll be a serious money-maker. They usually try to dress it up more. But Mirzadegan is direct and strangely tender on the subject.
“Ultimately, if you’re solving hard enough problems that matter enough to customers that are willing to spend money with you, you earn the right to do more,” said Mirzadegan. “We like this vessel because it’s really dang hard to build, really dang hard to sell, and really matters to customers. That’s how I feel about it. You end up falling in love with anything that’s sufficiently hard.”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle X: @agarfinks Email: [email protected]
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The post Exclusive: Roadrunner raises $27 million from Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund appeared first on Fortune.
