Before Propel had customers, offices or a name worth remembering, an investor wanted one answer: could Ron Hess build it? His yes became the hinge of a decade-long wager on product data in the cloud.
Pradyut Paul is the CEO and co-founder of Bild, a San Francisco cloud-native product data management (PDM) platform built for hardware engineers. A former RFIC designer at Raytheon and hardware program manager at Apple (iPhone 8 through 11, early AirTags), he started Bild while earning his MBA at Yale, raised $3M in seed funding months after graduating in 2021, and pivoted the company toward version control and collaboration for mechanical engineering teams - growing revenue tenfold in 2023.