Rajat Bhageria
Contributing Writer at TechCrunch
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
Founder and CEO
2019 - Current
We're hiring for lots of roles! See chefrobotics.ai/careers Chef is an Artificial Intelligence company that is building a general food manipulation model. Our mission is to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines which empower humans to do what humans do best. We're starting with the food industry and helping food companies overcome their crushing labor shortage while helping keep the American food supply chain on-shore. To this end, we’re working with major food-service chains and food production companies across the country and have deployed revenue-generating robots in production; our team is comprised of all Senior / Staff Engineers, Tech Leads, and Engineering Mangers ex Cruise, Google, Nuro, Fetch Robotics, Vicarious, Verb Surgical, Zoox, Tesla, Neuralink, YouTube, Kitty Hawk, Strateos, Built Robotics, Lockheed Martin, Yelp, Think Surgical, Facebook, and Microsoft. We're backed by Kleiner Perkins, Bloomberg Beta, Construct Capital, Promus Ventures, MFV Partners, MaC Venture Capital, ROBO Global, HCVC, BOLD Capital Partners, Alumni Ventures; the Founders of ZocDoc, Indiegogo, Tile, Expanse (PANW), Bright Machines, Gigster, Bitwise Asset Management; and ex and current executives from Loon (Alphabet), Blue River Robotics, Autodesk, Uber ATG, Google, Soft Robotics, AMP Robotics, Doordash, and Amazon Robotics. chefrobotics.ai
Chef Robotics is a robotics and artificial intelligence company serving the food industry.
Raised $22,500,000.00 from Kleiner Perkins, MFV Partners, Alumni Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Construct Capital, Interwoven Ventures, Promus Ventures, Red & Blue Ventures and Red & Blue Ventures.
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
2018
We believe in getting down in the trenches and being there right alongside the most ambitious founders in the world as together, we fund and found lasting 100-year businesses. Prototype Capital is a pre-seed venture capital fund with 72+ founder scouts around the nation and our companies collectively are worth $2B+. Co-investors include First Round Capital, ICONIQ, Addition, Menlo Ventures, Amplify Partners, General Catalyst, Next Gen Venture Partners, Afore Capital, Slack, Y Combinator, NFX, Cowboy Ventures, Primary VC, and Comcast Ventures. Select Investments: - Hightouch: Invested in Pre-seed in May 2019. Raised Series B from ICONIQ - Faze Clan: Invested Pre-seed in 2018. They're now public $FAZE - Ghost Robotics: Invested in Pre-seed in April 2018. Autonomous, ground-based quadruped robots. Being acquired at $400M Valuation - ViaBot: Invested in Pre-seed in June 2022. viabot.com (personal investment). - Building Machines: Invested at Seed in March 2022. buildingmachines.com (personal investment). - Polymath Robotics: Invested at Seed in March 2022. (personal investment). - AON3D: Invested Seed in June 2018. SineWave lead a $11.5m Series A. aon3d.com. - Kiwi bot: Invested at pre-seed in June 2018. Last-mile delivery for food delivery. kiwibot.com. - Aura Health. Invested in May 2018. - Pylon: Invested in seed in 2023. Scale Customer Communication on Slack. Raised from General Catalyst. (personal investment). - theCut: Invested in pre-seed in 2018. Marketplace to get find a barber (thecut.co) - CopyCat: Invested in pre-seed in 2018. www.copycat.dev. - Donut Media: Invested in seed in 2019. Acquired by Recurrent. - Dandy: Invested in Pre-seed in April 2019 and exited in Sept 2020. getdandy.com. - Groq: Invested in Series D in July 2024 (personal investment). - Skydio: Invested in Series E in July 2024 (personal investment). - Anduril: Invested in Series F in June 2024 (personal investment).
Prototype Capital is a distributed VC fund investing in obsessive founders building lasting businesses around revolutionary technologies.
Venture Product Partner
2020
Afore Capital is a $124M venture fund that focuses on pre-seed stage exclusively and is based in San Francisco.
Afore Capital is a venture fund that focuses on pre-seed stage exclusively and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Contributing Writer
2020
https://techcrunch.com/author/rajat-bhageria/
Writer
2015 - 2019
Writing about the intricacies of running a startup and VC fund: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rajatbhageria/
Forbes Magazine is a business magazine that is focused on business news and financial information.
Raised $200,000,000.00 from Binance.
Fellow
2017 - 2017
http://fellows.kleinerperkins.com/
Kleiner Perkins is a venture capital firm that specializes in investing in early-stage, incubation, and growth companies.
Special Projects with Founder
2017 - 2017
After ThirdEye, I interned and learned under Indiegogo Founder and 8-year CEO, Slava Rubin, about how to scale companies, manage and work effectively as a team, practice high output management, be an effective CEO, and build products at scale. Empowered entrepreneurs to raise money from anyone, anywhere as part of a lean internal startup scaling a Reg. CF equity crowdfunding platform, First Democracy VC. Hodgepodge of helping Slava with day to day, product management, software engineering, enterprise sales, marketing, financial planning and analysis, investing, and operations/process-building. https://equity.indiegogo.com
Indiegogo is a crowdfunding platform that empowers people around the world to fund projects that matter to them.
Raised $56,500,000.00 from Runway Venture Partners, Max Levchin, Webb Investment Network, Richard Branson, Maynard Webb and Tom Jones.
Writer
2014 - 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajat-bhageria/ Asked to write the chapter "Should we require computer science classes" in the college textbook, "College: A Reader for Writers" by Dr. James Pierce (Oxford University Press). https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/college-9780190279950
HuffPost, an online news aggregator and blog, publishes content on politics, entertainment, world news, sports, and technology.
Raised $37,000,000.00 from RRE Ventures.
Entrepreneur in Residence
2016 - 2017
During my final year at Wharton, I advised student founders on anything business and product, from fundraising to team management to UX design to engineering stack.
Venture Capital Investor
2016 - 2017
After ThirdEye and in my final year at Penn, I worked at Red & Blue Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm investing in Penn founders. Our pre-fund deals - as MentorTech Ventures - include early investments into Jet.com (acq. Walmart), Warby Parker, and Diapers.com (acq Amazon). http://redandblue.vc