Rahul
Pangam,
again.

The Story

A founder who keeps pulling the same thread.

Rahul Pangam runs RapidCanvas out of a Research Boulevard address in Austin, but the pitch he gives has been the same pitch since about 2010, when he was on a floor at Google trying to get fraud analysts to translate their instincts into product rules. The analysts knew the patterns. They just could not write the code. Somebody on the engineering team had to, and there were never enough somebodies. This is a durable problem, and Pangam has now built two companies aimed at it.

The first was Simility, co-founded in 2014 with Kedar Samant and Uttam Phalnikar - a machine-learning platform for detecting fraud, which PayPal acquired in June 2018 for roughly $120 million. Pangam had been the CEO. He spent the next three years inside PayPal as VP of Risk Strategy, which is the founder equivalent of extended lunch. Then he left, and in 2022 he and Phalnikar started RapidCanvas.

RapidCanvas is bigger in scope than Simility. Instead of one vertical - fraud - it targets what the marketing materials call the "full lifecycle" of enterprise AI, meaning it will help a manufacturer forecast demand, a bank assess risk, a retailer segment customers, a supply chain team plan production. It is the sort of pitch that in 2018 sounded like a demo and in 2026 sounds like a category, because generative AI has, in fact, made the demo work.

The Bet

Humans in the loop, on purpose.

One thing that is unusual about RapidCanvas, especially for a 2026 AI company, is that it keeps human data scientists on staff and hands them to customers. The product is not entirely a self-serve SaaS tool. It is a platform plus a small team of PhDs who help you use it. This is the sort of thing that VCs sometimes flag as a services business wearing a software shirt, and Pangam is happy to defend it. His stated rule is that AI is acceleration, not replacement. If you replace all the humans, you end up with confident nonsense delivered fast. If you keep humans and give them agents, you compress a six-month analytics engagement into a fortnight. The pitch resonates with buyers in regulated industries - finance, healthcare-adjacent, supply chain - who are not looking for a copilot they cannot audit.

Pangam has told the story that both companies trace back to a 15-year-old moment at Google, when he was asked to help fraud experts apply their knowledge without needing to code. He never quite got over the problem. Simility was one version of the answer. RapidCanvas is a bigger, more general one, made possible by the fact that large language models can now write serviceable code and read messy schemas.

The Path

GE, Google, Simility, PayPal, RapidCanvas.

The career arc goes: Clemson University for a Master's in Electrical Engineering; GE Energy as an application engineer and technical lead; the Ross School at Michigan for an MBA (2005-2007); then Google, where Pangam eventually ran Trust and Safety operations, having earlier run Webspam and AdSpam. Google is where he learned to think about fraud as a machine-learning problem rather than a rules problem, and where he met the people he later built with.

Simility, from 2014 to 2018, was the compressed version of the thesis. He and his co-founders built the engineering team in Hyderabad and the go-to-market team in the US, a split that he has said was possible because of his Google network and the depth of technical talent in Hyderabad. PayPal participated in the Series B in December 2017 and then acquired the company outright the following June. The story is told in an Accel podcast from 2019: a $120 million exit in four years, negotiated on both sides of a Pacific-shaped table.

Then he did the polite thing, spent time inside the acquirer, and got out.

The Backers

A seed and a Series A, four quarters apart.

Accel led the seed. The Series A closed in December 2024 as many AI startups were experiencing what one might call an enthusiasm hangover, and RapidCanvas used the round to hire chiefs - a COO in January 2025, a CMO in July, a CBO in October, a VP for enterprise AI solutions in November. The company also inked partnerships with a supply-chain consultancy (Citwell, February 2026) and a financial-services advisory firm (Virtas Partners, April 2026), which is the sort of enterprise plumbing that founders often skip in their pitch decks and buyers always ask about.

Voice

Three sentences that keep showing up.

These three sentences do a lot of work in interviews. They are the argument for why RapidCanvas keeps humans on staff, why it does not attempt to sell a fully autonomous product, and why the target customer is a business team lead rather than a data engineer.

The Company He Keeps

Same co-founder, second time.

Uttam Phalnikar was on the founding team at Simility, leading infrastructure and engineering, and he is a co-founder at RapidCanvas too. Founding partnerships that survive one exit and start another are rare. This one has held. Kedar Samant, the third Simility co-founder, is not part of RapidCanvas.

Around Pangam and Phalnikar, the current team includes Mayuresh Kshetramade as COO, Shatay Trigère as CMO, Marcelo Vieira as CBO, and a series of VPs across product, enterprise AI, and business development. Executive hires cluster in the twelve months after the Series A, which is the pattern that consultants like to draw on whiteboards but that founders rarely execute cleanly. Pangam has executed it cleanly.

Timeline

A career, on one page.

• 2000s
  Application engineer and technical lead at GE Energy after Clemson MS in Electrical Engineering.
• 2005-07
  MBA at the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business.
• 2007-14
  Google: Webspam, AdSpam, Product Quality Operations, ultimately Director of Trust and Safety.
• 2014
  Co-founds Simility with Kedar Samant and Uttam Phalnikar. Serves as CEO.
• 2017
  PayPal participates in Simility's Series B in December.
• 2018
  PayPal acquires Simility, reportedly for ~$120M. Pangam becomes VP Risk Strategy.
• 2022
  Co-founds RapidCanvas with Phalnikar. Sets up in Austin.
• 2024-03
  Closes $7.5M seed round led by Accel.
• 2024-12
  Closes $16M Series A.
• 2025-26
  Executive team build-out; partnerships with Citwell, Virtas, TresVista, CafeX.

In His Own Words

Watch.

Pangam sat down with Champion Leadership Group to talk through the human-in-the-loop pitch. He also appears in a longer conversation on the future of business intelligence, filmed for YouTube. Both are useful if you want to hear the argument at length rather than in headline form.

Watch: What Will Business Intelligence Look Like in 3 Years?

Questions

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