Rajat is the Founder and CEO of Chef. Prior to Chef, Rajat was Founder and Managing Partner at Prototype Capital, a pre-seed venture capital fund investing in founders who are applying new technology to old industries. Prior to Chef, Rajat was the Founder/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, has published a scientific paper in electrical engineering, and has written for Forbes about entrepreneurship. He has a Masters degree in Robotics and Machine Learning from University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors in Economics from The Wharton School at 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.