A chemical engineer can have a perfectly good job and still find himself asking an inconvenient question. Chetan Parikh worked at GE Plastics. He had the training for it, including graduate study in both chemical engineering and plastics engineering. Yet the work left him searching for another kind of purpose. “I was happy, but something was missing.” It is a modest sentence for a decision that would eventually take him into several companies, an acquisition, and another turn as a founder.
Today, Parikh leads RAAPID from Louisville, Kentucky. The title is founder and CEO. The more interesting description is someone building again, with enough experience to know that a new company does not begin the day its name is registered. Some of its beginnings sit in an old job. Some sit in a university friendship. Others survive inside work that an earlier company never quite finished.
The engineer who wanted another question
His education traces a route from L.D. College of Engineering in Ahmedabad to the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he earned two master’s degrees. Chemical engineering and plastics engineering belong to a world of materials, processes, and physical constraints. Long before he was discussing artificial intelligence with investors, he had studied how things behave when someone actually tries to make them.
That background is more than a curious entry on a software executive’s biography. His inventions include work involving thermoplastics and multilayer materials. The patent titles have the unromantic precision of objects expected to survive outside a presentation. They also give his later career a useful texture. Here is an AI founder whose earlier work involved questions quite literally about what something was made of.
There is a temptation to tidy such a career into a straight line, as though an engineering student were secretly preparing for a startup that did not yet exist. Parikh’s account is less convenient and more recognisable. A job can suit a person without answering every question that person has about work. Moving on can mean following that unresolved question, rather than discovering that everything before it was a mistake.
A roommate becomes a co-founder
One of the durable relationships in this story began at university. Parikh and Vatsal Ghiya became roommates and friends while studying engineering at the University of Massachusetts. They later became business collaborators. At RAAPID, Ghiya is co-founder and chief marketing officer. The relationship runs underneath the company history, connecting student life with the considerably less forgiving business of building a team.
The founders’ earlier services business dates to 2004. Customer relationships brought referrals, followed by investment in language-processing software and product development. The sequence matters. It places repeated work and contact with customers before the current company’s identity. A market is easier to describe in a pitch than to understand through years of answering people’s requests.
A roommate is also a pleasingly awkward figure for a polished business biography. Before the titles, there was a shared address. Before a leadership team, two people knew one another as students. It is a reminder that some professional connections begin without a networking strategy, and acquire their importance through what people go on to do together.
What survived the sale
On September 21, 2021, AGS Health announced that it had acquired ezDI. Parikh was the company’s CEO as well as a co-founder. An acquisition gives a career a date that fits neatly into a timeline. It says rather less about what the founder will do when the transaction is finished and the calendar starts filling up again.
ezDI combined several software functions into an integrated platform, with an ambition to make automation useful in day-to-day operations. Even at the moment of the sale, the language around the business concerned application: turning technology into something customers could put to work. A completed deal was one milestone in that effort, with the product continuing under new ownership.
Parikh had another beginning in mind. He has explained that certain intellectual property, still under development and not yet made into products, remained with him. A small group of colleagues also stayed to work on the next venture, with the buyer’s agreement. RAAPID therefore started with a useful inheritance: unfinished technical work and people who already understood it.
That detail changes the familiar picture of starting over. A new company can begin with accumulated judgment, established working relationships, and a clearer idea of what to attempt next. The balance sheet may change. The experience travels with the people. Parikh’s next act had a new name, but some of its momentum had been gathering for years.
September 21
February 3
Series A announced
A different kind of investor conversation
RAAPID’s formal formation date was February 3, 2022. Parikh was involved in a wider set of businesses, including Mediscribes and the AI training-data company Shaip. The picture is of a working life distributed across connected ventures, with the new company joining an existing network of operating experience.
By January 2025, RAAPID had announced Series A backing from M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Later backing included UPMC Enterprises and Healthworx. Those names matter as business relationships as well as entries in a funding history. A strategic investor can bring questions, access, and expectations along with capital. For a founder, each of those requires attention after the announcement has disappeared from the feed.
UPMC Enterprises spent months evaluating RAAPID before deciding to invest. He was struck by how the questions differed from those in ordinary sales meetings. The experience offers a glimpse of an established entrepreneur still being required to explain his assumptions. Having built before does not excuse a founder from answering the next difficult question.
There is something useful in that reversal. Founders spend much of their time explaining why a product deserves attention. Due diligence gives someone else the floor. The questions can expose a gap between what is easy to demonstrate and what a careful partner wants to understand. Parikh treated that difference as worth examining, even after the investment decision.
Company building also meant dividing responsibility. When Michael Clark took the roles of president and chief growth officer, his remit included marketing, business development, sales, operations, and customer success. Parikh led as founder and CEO. The arrangement gives a more concrete picture of leadership than the usual photograph of a founder alone. Turning a technical business into a growing company creates work across several desks, each with different decisions to make. The next customer conversation and the next product decision need people who can carry them through. A founder’s experience matters partly in how that work gets organised.
The model is only the beginning
Asked whether AI still constituted a durable advantage for vendors, Parikh offered a compact answer: “AI is an enabler now.” He went on to emphasise applied research, attention to a particular field, and the ability to turn new work into products quickly. It is an answer that gives a founder fewer opportunities to relax behind the vocabulary.
The distinction has practical consequences. If the underlying tools keep improving, possession of a tool is a temporary advantage. A company still needs to decide what to build, understand the people using it, and deliver something dependable. Parikh describes funding university research and translating that work into applied algorithms. The work continues beyond selecting a model.
His emphasis on trust gives the story another thread. By July 2026, RAAPID was working with Microsoft’s Pegasus program and Azure Marketplace, alongside its effort to make the product’s reasoning visible. These are routes into enterprise customers’ existing environments, where introducing software involves more than persuading someone to admire a demonstration.
A person adopting a product has to make room for it in an already crowded working day. Clear explanations and usable interfaces become part of the engineering problem. An answer that looks impressive on a stage may still need considerable work before someone wants it on a screen every morning. Parikh’s current chapter keeps returning to that distance between technical capability and everyday confidence.
“Our goal is to make human activities more meaningful”
Chetan Parikh, on RAAPID’s first anniversary
Back in the classroom
At RAAPID’s first anniversary, Parikh spoke about translating ambitions into goals and actionable strategies. He also emphasised resilience and learning from mistakes. The remarks have the familiar ingredients of a founder’s address, but they sit beside a career with concrete changes of direction. He had already moved from materials into software, helped build a company, and gone through its sale.
In February 2025, Ahmedabad University scheduled him to speak to students about his entrepreneurial journey, startup decisions, and fundraising. The setting brought the story back toward its educational beginnings. Years after studying engineering in Ahmedabad, he had a different kind of material to bring into a classroom: decisions made while building businesses.
The appeal of that story lies in its continuity. A university friend becomes a collaborator. Research becomes a product. A sale leaves room for another company. Experience remains useful without making the next attempt predictable. Parikh’s path gives each of those transitions a person and a date, rather than leaving them as advice on a slide.
RAAPID is another chapter in that working life, with investors to answer, a team to build, and customers to persuade. The engineer who once found something missing has kept finding more work to do. He has also kept some company along the way. For a story so often told through algorithms and funding rounds, the old roommate remains a rather good detail.