Dhiraj Sharma

Founder & CEO Simpplr

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Dhiraj Sharma is the founder and chief executive of Simpplr, an AI-powered employee intranet and employee experience platform that now sits at the top of both major analyst rankings of its category. The company’s argument is a simple one made repeatedly: that disjointed and fragmented internal tools actively obstruct the people who use them, and that consolidating what employees need into a single platform is worth more than any individual feature. He has run the business for more than a decade, alongside co-founder Piyush Rajput, and it has grown to over a thousand customers and more than two million active users on more than $131 million of venture funding. It is his third company — before Simpplr he founded the IT consulting services provider Simplion and the cloud-native software development firm Lirik Inc. — in a career he and his company describe as more than twenty years of building companies.

Career Highlights

• Founder and chief executive of Simpplr, listed as such on the company’s own leadership team page as of this review.
• Has led the company past 1,000 customers, more than two million active users, a stated 95% customer retention rate, and over two billion employee experiences delivered annually (Simpplr’s own figures).
• Raised more than $131 million across multiple rounds from Norwest Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Tola Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Still Venture Capital, including a $70 million Series D.
• Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions and in The Forrester Wave for Intranet Platforms, Q2 2026 — a rare position at the top of both analyst evaluations of the same category.
• Oversaw Simpplr’s move into AI, including the integration of the acquired Socrates.ai technology and the launch of an AI Control Center.
• Founded two companies before Simpplr: Simplion, an information technology consulting services provider, and Lirik Inc., a cloud-native software development firm.

Professional Journey

Sharma’s career began in IT services rather than product software. He founded Simplion, an information technology consulting services provider, and subsequently Lirik Inc., a cloud-native software development firm. Neither company’s founding year is stated in any source read for this review, but the pattern matters: both were services businesses built on delivering software for other people, and Simpplr was the move to owning a product.

Simpplr entered a category — the corporate intranet — that had a poor reputation, dominated by heavyweight platforms that employees avoided. Sharma’s pitch inverted the framing, treating the intranet not as a document repository but as the surface through which employees experience their employer. As he put it in the company’s own words, happy and productive employees “stay informed, build strong connections and excel in their work”, and fragmented tools are what stops them. That positioning carried the company into the broader employee-experience market and, later, into AI: Simpplr has since folded in the acquired Socrates.ai technology, shipped AI search, AI agents and an AI Control Center, and now describes itself as building a trailblazing AI platform for work.

The commercial record supports the strategy. Simpplr has raised more than $131 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Tola Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Still Venture Capital, including a $70 million Series D, and reports over a thousand customers and more than two million active users. It has been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions in 2025 and in The Forrester Wave for Intranet Platforms in the second quarter of 2026 — the two evaluations that matter most in the category, and an unusual double. Sharma remains founder and chief executive, with the engineering organisation led by co-founder Piyush Rajput. All growth, funding and customer figures in this paragraph are the company’s own.

Education

San Jose State University

Master’s degree, Computer Science

A caution on this entry. Simpplr’s own biography of Sharma states that he “holds a master’s degree in computer science” but does not name the institution. San Jose State University is carried over from an earlier version of this profile and from data aggregators, and could not be confirmed by any source checked in this review; the field of study has been corrected from computer engineering to computer science on the company’s own authority. No graduation year was found.