Rajat Bhageria: Founder and CEO of Chef Robotics

Wharton, robotics, and ThirdEye

Bhageria earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the Wharton School and a master's degree in robotics and machine learning from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied in the GRASP Lab.^1,2

As a student he co-founded and ran ThirdEye, which used computer vision and audio feedback to tell blind and visually impaired people what they were looking at. ThirdEye was sold in 2017. He also wrote a book on education reform, What High School Didn't Teach Me.^2,3

Prototype Capital

In 2015 he co-founded Prototype Capital with Nandeet Mehta, a pre-seed fund that backs student and young founders outside the Ivy League through a network of scouts. He remains its managing partner.^4,3

Before Chef he was a Kleiner Perkins fellow and worked in venture capital at Red and Blue Ventures and on the equity crowdfunding team at Indiegogo. Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list in 2021.³

Building Chef Robotics

Bhageria founded Chef Robotics in 2019. It started out aiming at fast-casual restaurants, then moved to food manufacturing, where it now serves Amy's Kitchen, Chef Bombay, and a large school lunch provider.⁵

He has said Chef's next market is smaller kitchens, including one of the largest airline caterers in the world, and that data from its servings in production feeds the AI models that guide the robots.⁵