RB

Rajat Bhageria

Contributing Writer at TechCrunch

San Francisco Bay Area

Overview 

Rajat Bhageria is a successful roboticist, entrepreneur, and CEO of Chef Robotics in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a strong background in start-ups, venture capital, and product development. Notable career highlights include founding Chef Robotics and Prototype Capital, as well as investing in a range of innovative companies in the robotics and AI sectors.

Work Experience 

  • Founder and CEO

    2019 - Current

    We're hiring for lots of roles! See chefrobotics.ai/careers Our mission is to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines which empower humans to do what humans do best. Today, we use AI-enabled robotics to empower food companies to overcome their crushing labor shortage and increase production volume while helping keep the American food supply chain on-shore. We're starting with food manufacturing to learn how to manipulate food with the goal of ultimately deploying a robot in every commercial kitchen in the US - chefrobotics.ai for more. Our team is comprised of senior/staff engineers from companies like Google, Nuro, Amazon Robotics, Bear Robotics, Saildrone, Verb Surgical, Tesla. We're backed by funds like Kleiner Perkins, Bloomberg Beta, Construct Capital, and Promus Ventures; the Founders of ZocDoc, Indiegogo, Expanse (PANW), Bright Machines; executives from Loon (Alphabet), Blue River Robotics, Autodesk, Uber ATG, Soft Robotics, AMP Robotics, Amazon Robotics.

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 - Ghost Robotics: Invested in Pre-seed in April 2018. Acquired at $400M Valuation - Faze Clan: Invested Pre-seed in 2018. Went public $FAZE - Pylon: Invested in Seed in 2023. Scale Customer Communication on Slack. a16z lead Series A (personal investment). - New Lantern: Invested in Series A in Nov 2024. Benchmark lead Series A (personal investment) - ViaBot: Invested in Pre-seed in June 2022. viabot.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. kiwibot.com. - Aura Health. Invested in May 2018. - theCut: Invested in pre-seed in 2018. - 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. - Groq: Invested in Series D (personal investment). - Skydio: Invested in Series E (personal investment). - Anduril: Invested in Series F (personal investment). - Lambda Labs: Invested in 2024 (personal investment). - Rippling: Invested in Series F (personal investment) - Rescale: Invested in Series D (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

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