RB

Rajat Bhageria

Roboticist, Founder, CEO at Chef Robotics (We're hiring!)

San Francisco Bay Area

Invests in

Stages:

  • Min Investment:

    $500,000.00
  • Max Investment:

    $1,200,000.00
  • Target Investment:

    $750,000.00

Work Experience

  • Founder and CEO

    2019

    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

  • 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).

  • Venture Product Partner

    2020

    Afore Capital is a $124M venture fund that focuses on pre-seed stage exclusively and is based in San Francisco.

  • Contributing Writer

    2020

    https://techcrunch.com/author/rajat-bhageria/

2015 - 2019

  • Writer

    2015 - 2019

    Writing about the intricacies of running a startup and VC fund: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rajatbhageria/

  • Fellow

    2017 - 2017

    http://fellows.kleinerperkins.com/

2017 - 2017

  • 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

2014 - 2017

  • 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

2016 - 2017

  • 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.

2016 - 2017

  • 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