Rajat Bhageria, 25
Founder and CEO, Chef Robotics; Founder and managing partner, Prototype Capital
Location: San Francisco
Education: B.S. in economics and M.S. in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania
Resume: Bhageria was one of the co-founders of ThirdEye Technologies, a tool used to help visually impaired people navigate the world through auditory messages. Born out of a college hackathon, he served as CEO of the company until it was acquired by TheBlindGuide in 2017.
Surprising fact: Bhageria says his first entrepreneurial effort was self-publishing a book called “What High School Didn't Teach Me,” which he wrote at the age of 17, recounting his experiences as a recent graduate.
Rajat Bhageria started and sold his first startup before he even finished college.
Soon after graduating, he co-founded Prototype Capital, a venture capital firm with the mission of finding and funding innovative ideas and entrepreneurs outside of traditional innovation centers like the Bay Area and New York City.
So what's left to accomplish for the wunderkind? Revolutionizing the food industry through his San Francisco startup Chef Robotics.
Bhageri, who was born in India and grew up in Cincinnati, comes from a line of engineers on his father’s side and businesspeople on his mother’s side. Among his list of idols are inventors like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. The philosophy that drives him is turning advances in software and machine learning toward problems in the physical world.
Chef is a perfect encapsulation of this idea. The company’s focus is using cutting-edge robotics to address the very physical problems around labor that are endemic in food production.
“In 2019, when we were starting Chef, we saw that food service and production companies desperately need some sort of solution to their labor problem because they basically had half of their people coming to work,” Bhageria said. “I mean, literally. If you're missing half of your labor force, you just don't have enough supply of people to meet the demand of customers. It really is a desperate problem.”
The road to success is littered with the mechanical carcasses of other robotics companies, but Bhageria said he’s learned from their missteps. For one, Chef is focused on serving other food companies as a B2B business rather than starting their own restaurant, simplifying their revenue model. It also takes a page out of large manufacturers like Boeing, surveying and selling to potential customers prior to production, to ensure that their machine comes out right the first time.
Bhageria touts millions in pre-bookings and the $7.7 million seed and pre-seed round from Kleiner Perkins, Promus Ventures and Bloomberg Beta, among others, as validation of the company’s strategy.
The next mission for the 15-person startup is pretty simple, albeit daunting: Change the way we produce the food we eat every day.
