Ryan Denehy

Founder and CEO Electric AI

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Ryan Denehy founded Electric in 2016 to solve a problem that sits in a genuine gap in the market: small and mid-sized businesses need the same IT management that enterprises have — device provisioning, application access, security policy, helpdesk support — but cannot justify the headcount to run it. Electric delivers that as a platform, unifying IT and HR operations by integrating with payroll and human capital management systems so that hiring and offboarding drive device and application access automatically. It is his third company and, by the measure most investors use, his most successful: a $90 million Series D in late 2021 was followed by a $20 million Series D-1 in March 2022 that valued the business at $1 billion post-money, on revenue that had grown from $17 million to $38 million in annual recurring revenue over the preceding year. The path there was unusual. He sold his first company, started at seventeen, to USA TODAY Sports while still an undergraduate, spent five years inside USA Today and became Gannett’s youngest executive, and then sold his second company, Swarm Mobile, to Groupon in 2014.

Career Highlights

• Founded Electric in 2016 and leads it as Chief Executive Officer.
• Built an IT management platform unifying IT and HR operations across application management, device management, hardware procurement, support and cybersecurity.
• Reached a $1 billion post-money valuation with a $20 million Series D-1 in March 2022, following a $90 million Series D five months earlier.
• Grew annual recurring revenue from $17 million in 2020 to $38 million in 2021, with more than $70 million projected for 2022.
• Serves over 1,000 customer businesses and more than 47,000 directly supported end users.
• Started his first company at seventeen and sold it to USA TODAY Sports four years later.
• Became the youngest executive at Gannett during five years at USA Today.
• Sold Swarm Mobile, a retail analytics company for SMBs, to Groupon in 2014.
• Raised from GGV Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Primary Venture Partners and Bowery Capital in Electric’s earlier rounds; serves as an Expert Advisor at Tercera.

Professional Journey

Denehy started his first company at seventeen — an action sports video production business — and ran it through his time at Hofstra University. USA TODAY Sports acquired it four years later, while he was still an undergraduate. That sale delivered him not just an exit but an employer: he spent the following five years inside USA Today in a succession of roles, and by the time he left he was the youngest executive at Gannett, its parent. It is an unusual apprenticeship for a software founder, and one that gave him operating experience at scale before he had any at a startup.

His second company was Swarm Mobile, a retail analytics business aimed at small and mid-sized retailers — a market he would return to. Groupon acquired it in 2014, three years after founding, giving him a second exit before thirty. The Groupon period is where the thesis for his third company took shape: serving small businesses profitably means removing the labour from the service, not adding cheaper labour to it.

Electric, founded in 2016, applies that directly to IT. The pitch is that a company of fifty or five hundred people has exactly the same IT surface as a large enterprise — endpoints to secure, SaaS applications to provision and deprovision, a helpdesk to staff, compliance to satisfy — and no economic way to staff it. Electric automates the work and integrates with payroll and HCM systems so that a new hire in the HR system results in a provisioned laptop and the right application access without anyone filing a ticket. That integration point, the seam between HR and IT, is the company’s real product insight.

Growth followed. Annual recurring revenue moved from $17 million in 2020 to $38 million in 2021, a 124% increase, with the company projecting over $70 million for 2022. Early backing came from GGV Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Primary Venture Partners and Bowery Capital. A $90 million Series D closed around October 2021, and in March 2022 a further $20 million Series D-1 — with Harmonic Growth Partners, Vintage Investment Partners, Greenspring and the Slack Fund participating — set a $1 billion post-money valuation. The company serves more than a thousand businesses and supports over 47,000 end users directly from a headquarters on Broadway in Manhattan, alongside a leadership team including a chief technology officer, chief operating officer and product, revenue and marketing leadership.

Denehy speaks and writes frequently about the operating lessons across the three companies, particularly about fundraising, wartime leadership and treating pre-product-market-fit work as systems design rather than engineering. He also serves as an Expert Advisor at Tercera.

Education

Hofstra University

Attended. Sources record that his first company was acquired while he was still at college and do not state that he completed a degree; no degree, field or graduation year was found in any public source.