Summary
Rajat Bhageria is the founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, which builds AI-powered robots for food manufacturing under a Robotics-as-a-Service model. Born in India and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, he sold his first startup, a computer-vision aid for the visually impaired, while still an undergraduate, then ran a pre-seed venture fund before founding Chef in 2019 and steering it through an early pivot away from restaurants toward food manufacturing.
Career
Bhageria studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Wharton School while simultaneously completing a Master’s degree in Robotics and Machine Learning at Penn’s GRASP Lab. As a Penn undergraduate, he co-founded ThirdEye Technologies out of a 2014 PennApps hackathon project with fellow students Ben Sandler, Joe Cappadona, and David Ongchoco (later joined by Daniel Hanover and Nandeet Mehta); the team built a mobile app that used Google’s Cloud Vision API to describe nearby objects and read text aloud for blind and visually impaired users. Bhageria has said the team bootstrapped the company entirely without outside investment, leveraging their student status to build distribution partnerships with organizations serving the visually impaired (Philadelphia Inquirer). In February 2017, ThirdEye was acquired by TheBlindGuide LLC, a South Carolina-based e-commerce company serving the vision-impaired community, for an undisclosed sum (TechCrunch).
After graduating, Bhageria founded and ran Prototype Capital, a pre-seed venture capital fund aimed at backing student and early-career founders applying new technology to established industries, working with a network of founder-scouts across college campuses (Equilar ExecAtlas; TechCrunch). He has also written a book on education reform and a column on entrepreneurship for Forbes.
In March 2019, Bhageria founded Chef Robotics, initially targeting fast-casual restaurants with a robotic meal-assembly line. After signing multimillion-dollar restaurant contracts that the company ultimately could not technically fulfill, he redirected Chef toward high-mix food manufacturing — fresh and frozen prepared meals, hospital and airline trays, and school lunches — where longer production runs and narrower per-worker task scope made it feasible to collect the real-world training data his robots needed. He led Chef through an $11.2 million seed round in 2023 and a $43.1 million Series A in 2025, and by 2026 the company’s robots had completed more than 100 million servings for customers including Amy’s Kitchen (TechCrunch).
Bhageria has described his ambition for Chef in explicitly category-defining terms, comparing it to OpenAI’s role in large language models or Tesla’s in electric vehicles, and the company has built a proprietary “Food Foundation Model” — a vision-language model paired with an action-policy network, trained via imitation learning from human demonstrations rather than manual programming — that it is extending from high-volume manufacturing lines toward more complex, lower-volume prep-table assembly for use cases like ghost kitchens, airline catering, and hospitals (The Spoon).
Source Notes
This profile draws on Rajat Bhageria’s LinkedIn profile, his University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab bio, a Forbes profile, an Equilar ExecAtlas executive biography, contemporaneous Philadelphia Inquirer and TechCrunch coverage of ThirdEye’s founding and 2017 acquisition, and TechCrunch and The Spoon interviews on Chef Robotics’ pivot and growth. His exact birth year is not confirmed in available sources and has been intentionally left blank rather than estimated.