Anish Dhar

Anish Dhar is co-founder and CEO of Cortex, the internal developer portal company from Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. A Bay Area-raised engineer who spent nearly five years at Uber, he is known for starting Cortex after watching microservices turn into an unmapped labyrinth.

Homeroom, Divtera, then Uber

Dhar co-founded Homeroom, an early collaborative workflow startup that did not work, then joined Uber out of college. He worked across Uber Eats and Jump while services multiplied, documentation scattered, and ownership became tribal knowledge. A nights-and-weekends home-equity startup, Divtera, also did not stick - but the service-sprawl problem did.

A 48-hour Airbnb prototype becomes Cortex

In July 2019 he rented an Airbnb with friends Ganesh Datta and Nikhil Unni for a 48-hour sprint and emerged with a working prototype. He left Uber that October; Cortex joined YC W20 and raised a Sequoia seed while still near zero revenue. Later rounds, including a Series C, funded expansion of the portal for service ownership, scorecards, and engineering insights used by companies such as Adobe, Grammarly, and Canva.

On killing developer tax

He has described engineers naming services after video games and losing context when people leave. Cortex's pitch is eliminating "developer tax" - the minutes spent hunting owners and standards before real work starts - by making ownership and scorecards visible in one system.