Revolutionizing the food industry with robotics and AI

Rajat is the Founder and CEO of Chef Robotics. Prior to Chef, Rajat was Founder and Managing Partner at Prototype Capital, a pre-seed venture capital fund investing in founders who apply new technology to old industries. Before that, Rajat was the Founder and CEO of ThirdEye, where he led a team to build a product that empowers the visually impaired by recognizing what’s in front of them; ThirdEye was ultimately sold. Rajat has written a book about education reform, published a scientific paper in electrical engineering, and written for Forbes about entrepreneurship. He has a Master’s degree in Robotics and Machine Learning from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s in Economics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Prior to Chef, Ray served as the COO and Co-Founder of Specific Diagnostics from 2013 until its acquisition by bioMerieux Inc. in 2022 for $425M. During his tenure, he led development, manufacturing, and operations, with responsibilities extending to marketing, customer engagements, fundraising, finance, and business development at different stages of the company's growth.

Before Specific, Ray was at Symbol Technologies, acquired by Motorola Solutions, and finally acquired by Zebra Technologies (NASDAQ: ZBRA); here, he served in increasing positions from engineer to VP of Engineering to General Manager to SVP Marketing and finally CTO over 14 years. During his time at Symbol, the company grew from $20M to over $2B in annual revenue. As a General Manager, he led teams that launched products – sold to manufacturing companies and retail companies – supporting annual revenues of over $1.5B. Under his leadership, Symbol pioneered mobile computers, barcode scanners, and wireless networks (WiFi), becoming the first-to-market with WiFi products.

Prior to Chef, Somudro was Head of Autonomous Vehicle Engineering at Embark Trucks, a publicly traded company that was acquired by Applied Intuition in 2022. Over his five year tenure, Somudro joined as the first software engineer where he built much of Embark’s autonomy stack; he was then promoted to lead the Motion Planning and Controls team; he then was further promoted to lead the entire autonomy division at Embark, representing 45 software engineers. Prior to Embark, Somudro was at Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory; he was the US Motion Planning Lead for Jack, a self-driving Audi A7 that drove 550 miles from the Bay Area to Las Vegas for CES 2015 (the longest demonstrated autonomous highway drive at the time).

John is a technical leader, with a hardware engineering background, who has designed and built a variety of physical products. Particularly in the computer vision and automation space. John has experience setting up global supply chains (particularly in Asia), working with contract manufacturers and building internal manufacturing infrastructure and teams. 

His most recent experience includes building the hardware team and product at Third Wave Automation, an autonomous forklift company. He also, at Stockwell, grew the hardware team from zero to 30 team members responsible for hardware design, engineering, manufacturing, and field maintenance. They deployed over 1,500 units to four major metro areas in the US before an acquisition.

Kartheek is Chef's Head of Software.

Before joining Chef, Kartheek led sensor signal processing at Cruise, where he directed the development of advanced imaging systems for autonomous vehicles and optimized crucial data pipelines for machine learning models.

At Light Labs, he built and enhanced top-tier engineering capabilities, successfully launching the innovative multi-aperture camera system (L16) and pioneering the 5-camera smartphone system (Nokia 9).

Earlier in his career, Kartheek contributed to technical excellence across multiple flagship camera generations at GoPro while developing the company's first proprietary System-on-Chip for the consumer market.

He began his professional journey at Ricoh Americas, where he led strategic imaging research initiatives for seven years.

Over 40 U.S. patents and publications evidence Kartheek's commitment to technological innovation in computational imaging and computer vision. He holds a Master's in Electrical Engineering and is an IEEE Senior Member.

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Lyz joined Chef in 2025 to lead the Finance function with 7+ years experience specifically in robotics, automation, AI, and high-growth technology companies. As Corporate Controller at Bright Machines, she led the company’s go-public preparedness, overseeing its first PCAOB audit and successful S-4 filing. Prior to that, as Director of Finance at Kindred AI, she managed the accounting function through a $36M Series C funding round and the company’s subsequent acquisition by Ocado PLC.

With a background in public accounting and strong experience in business operations, fundraising, and M&A, Lyz has worked across various stages of growth and a range of company functions. She obtained her executive MBA at the Wharton School in 2023 and her expertise includes audit readiness, financial reporting, and strategic planning in technology-focused industries.

Justine is a seasoned people and recruiting operations leader with a proven track record of building and scaling high-performing teams at early-stage and growth-stage robotics and AI companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Driven by a passion for fostering talent and shaping company culture, Justine has built recruiting and people operations functions from the ground up, working closely with leadership to drive strategic growth. At Kindred AI and Rapid Robotics, she successfully scaled engineering and product organizations by 4x, established foundational teams, and implemented talent strategies that attract and retain top industry talent. Her ability to align people operations with business objectives has played a key role in helping companies thrive in fast-paced, high-growth environments.