Kshitij Grover

Kshitij Grover is co-founder and chief technology officer of Orb, a billing and revenue platform that AI and software companies use to price, meter and invoice usage. He founded the company in 2021 with Alvaro Morales, whom he met when both joined Asana early on.

Living Through Pricing Changes at Asana

Grover and Morales worked together as engineering leaders at Asana for five years, during a period of major changes to the company's pricing and packaging, TechCrunch reported. Both came from software engineering, and they were often the people asked to implement new plans and packages. The work was painful for engineering and finance alike, and updates to rigid pricing systems often took months. That experience convinced them that billing needed the flexibility of a developer platform, and in 2021 they started Orb to provide it.

Making the Case for Orb

At the end of 2023, with the AI boom in full swing, Grover wrote an essay on his blog asking why anyone would work on enterprise billing software. His answer: "it's so that you don't have to." Teams "ranging from OpenAI to Snowflake," he wrote, spend "double-digit percentage points of their time on extracting value instead of generating value." He describes Orb as revenue infrastructure, a data product that ingests usage events at millions per second, and puts its pitch plainly: "Orb isn't a billing company. At Orb, we sell growth."

Billing in the Age of Vibe Coding

In a later essay, "Orb and the end of enterprise software," he took on the idea that companies will simply build their own software with AI. "Claude Code is pretty damn good," he conceded, but he argued that buyers of software like Orb are not paying for features. "You're paying for accumulated judgement about a domain," he wrote, and in complex fields buying software "is effectively about buying scar tissue." On his scale of how hard a domain is to rebuild, billing sits "closer to databases than most people think."

Hosting Tractable

Grover hosts Tractable, Orb's podcast for engineering leaders about the hardest technical problems their organizations face, from scaling under demand to rebuilding a technical stack. Guests have included Dane Knecht of Cloudflare and Gwen Shapira of Nile. He has also discussed his path from Asana to Orb, and when companies should build or buy billing, on the Build vs. Buy podcast.