Third Chief Executive in Two Years

Eighteen months before the summer of 2022, DataRobot had been valued at $6 billion. By that June, the Boston Globe later reported, one of Boston's leading artificial-intelligence companies was in danger of collapsing under a combination of overheated financial expectations, excessive spending and an employee revolt.

The spark was a report in The Information that chief executive Dan Wright and four other top executives had been allowed to sell $32 million of DataRobot stock at a peak valuation, at a time when other employees could not. Top talent started quitting. In July, the board replaced Wright with the company's president and chief operating officer, who had joined only five months earlier.

The board's choice was Debanjan Saha, still DataRobot's chief executive officer today. His first major decision was to cut a quarter of the workforce.

Five Months, Then The Company

Saha arrived at DataRobot in February 2022 from Google, where he had been vice president and general manager of data analytics at Google Cloud. Before that came Amazon Web Services, which he joined in 2014 and where, as vice president and general manager, he led the company's database services and oversaw development of Aurora. Before that, more than a dozen years at IBM, which had lured him away from a professor's career after his PhD in computer science at the University of Maryland. That run was interrupted by a stint at an optical networking startup, where, the Globe noted, he saw the ups and downs of the internet bubble firsthand.

None of those jobs had handed him a company in revolt. DataRobot did.

The layoffs came in August 2022: one employee in four. The executive suite turned over almost completely. Eight people who had carried "chief" in their titles under Wright departed, among them the chief financial officer and the chief people officer, and their replacements were given senior vice president titles instead. A Gartner analyst, quoted by the Globe, put the problem bluntly: DataRobot was on its third chief executive in two years, and the open question was whether new leadership could put out an internal cultural fire and keep its best people.

On September 20, 2022, the board dropped the interim label. Saha said that day: "I am inspired by the opportunity ahead of us and am honored to lead DataRobot through its next phase of growth."

The question was what growth could mean in a market that had just closed.

The Deadline He Would Not Set

Wright's top priority, according to the Globe, had been taking DataRobot public. The market had other plans. By October 2022, shares of C3.ai were down more than 90 percent from their peak and Snowflake's more than 60 percent, and the stock market's drop had all but shut the flow of initial public offerings. Analysts told the Globe that DataRobot was worth considerably less than $6 billion.

In his first interview in the top job, Saha refused to put a date on anything. "If your focus changes to ‘I have to do an IPO by this time’ or ‘I have to get to this stock value by this time,’ that often gets us off track", he told the Globe, without naming his predecessor.

Nor would he promise a recovery on schedule. "I don’t know how long it will take for the market to recover," he said, before making the one claim a company in DataRobot's position could make: that "we have a long runway and we are going to stay focused on delighting our customers."

The runway was the bet. What he would build on it was the next question.

He changed habits along with the organization chart. Weekly all-company emails detailing his customer meetings and what he had learned from them. An innovation day at which employees pitched ideas for new products and features. Trips from the Bay Area to the Boston office once or twice a month, where Wright, based in California, had made few visits, citing the pandemic.

The Product Changed Shape

DataRobot was founded in 2012 by data scientists Jeremy Achin and Tom de Godoy to help customers build predictive business models with machine learning. In 2022, Saha described the underlying technology in expansive terms: "It’s not a point technology, it’s more like software, it’s more like the Internet".

Four years later, the company sells something narrower and more ambitious at once: the Agent Workforce Platform, co-engineered with NVIDIA, built to create, operate and govern AI agents across cloud, on-premises, hybrid and air-gapped environments. In March 2026, DataRobot paired with Nebius to run agent workloads on dedicated NVIDIA-GPU infrastructure. In June, it announced a collaboration with Chevron U.S.A. to apply agentic AI at the edge to robotic inspections; Saha's claim was that Chevron "can deploy AI decision-making at the edge" while meeting its security, reliability and governance requirements. The same month, Gartner named DataRobot a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms for the third consecutive year. In October, Etisalat UAE, which has worked with DataRobot since 2022, signed a new multi-year agreement under which the platform will be hosted in the telecom operator's own data centre.

The pitch is aimed squarely at the largest cloud providers, two of which once employed him. In June he argued that "true enterprise AI transformation doesn’t happen inside a single hyperscaler’s walls."

The Hard Part Is Production

The most candid document in DataRobot's press kit is its own research. The company's 2026 Unmet AI Needs Survey found that 94 percent of organizations hit operational failures after deploying agentic AI, and that the average time from idea to production still sat at 7.3 months. DataRobot presents that gap as the reason it exists. It is also a measure of how far the market Saha has bet the company on remains from working reliably.

He has conceded as much in his own words. In March he said: "Agentic AI is only valuable if it works every time, not just in demos."

Another Board Calls Him

On October 1, 2026, Vertex, Inc., the Nasdaq-listed indirect tax and compliance company, announced it had elected Saha a director effective October 7, expanding its board from nine members to 10. Vertex's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission records his title as chief executive of DataRobot since September 2022. He also sits on the board of Sorenson Communications.

He told Vertex that "Indirect tax touches nearly every enterprise transaction," and described his own record in terms that read like a summary of 2022: "I've spent my career scaling AI organizations through exactly this kind of inflection point".

In October 2022, three months into the job and two months after cutting a quarter of his staff, Saha told the Globe: "We have turned the page and we are looking forward to the future". Four years on, the page he turned to is agents. Whether they work every time, and not just in demos, is the test he has now set in public.