1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Alex Benik, Encoded Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That’s refreshing to hear. Tell us what you’ve invested in. Let’s go over some case studies. Describe the situation when they came to you, what attracted you, what made you write the check, and what you saw in those deals.

Alex Benik: Sure. A number of companies are still in stealth, but one that’s launched is ConfigHub. It was founded by Alexis Richardson, Brian Grant, and Jesper Joergensen. I had met one of the founders during my time at Battery, although we didn’t invest. The configuration management space was familiar to me. I was on the board of Chef from zero revenue to its acquisition, so I had good market context.

What excited me was a world-class team in a space I understood.

Sramana Mitra: Where was the team coming from?

Alex Benik: Alexis was previously a founder at Weaveworks and had worked at SpringSource, which was acquired by VMware. Brian was a distinguished engineer at Google, worked on Omega and Borg, and was on the founding Kubernetes team. Jesper was most recently a GM at Twilio and was previously the product manager for Heroku at Salesforce.

Sramana Mitra: Strong infrastructure background.

Alex Benik: Yes, and geographically distributed. Alexis is in London, and Brian and Jesper are in the Bay Area.

Sramana Mitra: What specific problem are they solving?

Alex Benik: Operating and scaling large-scale infrastructure is increasingly challenging for SaaS companies and enterprises. Configuration sprawl is common—whether it’s Chef, Puppet, Terraform from Hashicorp, secrets, or policies. All these live in different places. ConfigHub aims to centralize that in a single database and build operational workflows on top, starting with Kubernetes. Over time, that could expand into security and compliance workflows.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple more examples, then I’ll ask some broader trend questions. Also, talk about what role AI is playing in these businesses and how it informs your decisions.

Alex Benik: Even in the ConfigHub example, AI plays a role. Right now, humans are doing deployments and building automations. In the future, agents or agentic operators could take over parts of that. These agents will need a source of truth to read the current infrastructure state and write back changes. The company is aware of that and building with that in mind.

Sramana Mitra: Here’s a broader question. There’s a pricing debate going on right now. Products like Atlassian use user-based subscription pricing, but if agents are doing more work and teams are shrinking, the user-based model doesn’t scale very well anymore. What are you seeing, and how are your companies thinking about pricing?

Alex Benik: It’s definitely in flux. I wouldn’t say the goal is to reduce workforces—it’s more about empowering users to do more.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, the market is in domain-specific, human-augmented workflows. That’s the current state of AI in most products.

Alex Benik: I’m very familiar with Atlassian and Jira. At Battery, we invested in OpsGenie, which Atlassian acquired. I think the model will likely shift toward a compute-centric basis—similar to how people pay for Snowflake, Databricks, or AWS. You’ll probably look at the compute required for agentic operations, especially if they’re hosted, and then build some kind of margin on top.

For companies that are more workflow-centric, those tend to be stickier and have more pricing power.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Alex Benik, Encoded Ventures
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