# Ravin Thambapillai

> Ravin Thambapillai is the co-founder and CEO of Credal.ai, a New York security-first platform that lets large, regulated enterprises deploy AI agents without leaking the data those agents touch. A philosophy-politics-economics graduate from Oxford who taught himself to code into a job at Google, he spent seven years at Palantir building AI systems for banks, life-sciences firms, and public-health institutions before starting Credal in 2022, months ahead of the ChatGPT wave. Backed by Y Combinator and a $4.8M seed led by Spark Capital, Credal serves customers like MongoDB, Wise, Checkr, and the US government, processing over a million LLM queries a month.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Credal.ai
- **Organizations:** Credal.ai, Palantir Technologies, Google, GoCardless, THG (The Hut Group)
- **Nationality:** British
- **Education:** BA, Economics and Politics (PPE), University of Oxford
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Credal.ai, an enterprise AI security platform backed by Y Combinator (W23), Raised a $4.8M seed round led by Spark Capital ($5M total), Built a platform processing over one million LLM queries per month

## Career timeline

- **2007-2010** — Studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Economics and Politics) at the University of Oxford
- **early 2010s** — Taught himself to code and joined Google, working as an industry analyst building revenue models and reporting methodologies
- **2010s** — Held leadership roles at THG/The Hut Group (which later IPO'd) and GoCardless (which became a unicorn)
- **~2015-2022** — Spent seven years at Palantir building AI-powered systems for financial institutions, life-sciences firms, and public-health institutions, including emergency public-health infrastructure during COVID
- **2022-08** — Over a New York dinner with future co-founder Jack Fischer, identified how hard it would be for security-sensitive enterprises to trust generative AI
- **2022-12** — Co-founded Credal.ai and became CEO; joined Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch
- **2023-04** — Launched the Credal platform; began processing LLM calls for early enterprise customers
- **2023-10** — Announced a $4.8M seed round led by Spark Capital, with $5M total raised
- **2024-2025** — Grew Credal to over a million LLM queries per month, serving MongoDB, Wise, Checkr, Lattice, Comcast and US federal agencies; repositioned as the control plane for enterprise AI agents

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Credal.ai, an enterprise AI security platform backed by Y Combinator (W23)
- Raised a $4.8M seed round led by Spark Capital ($5M total)
- Built a platform processing over one million LLM queries per month
- Landed enterprise customers including MongoDB, Wise, Checkr, Lattice, Comcast and the US federal government
- Self-taught engineer who broke into Google from a non-technical PPE background
- Made Credal one of the few vendors of its kind registered under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework

## Latest updates

- **2024-2025** — Repositioned Credal as 'the control plane for enterprise agents,' enabling AI agents to collaborate across Salesforce, GSuite and Slack while respecting user permissions.
- **2025-02** — Posted publicly on the central question of his work: 'How do you actually get AI adoption over the line' past enterprise security teams.

## Links

- Website: https://www.credal.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ai-security
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/ravin_tham
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WM_f1yzO5g

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/ravin-thambapillai
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-21