Rahul Pangam is co-founder and chief executive of RapidCanvas, the Austin, Texas, managed AI company he started in 2021 with Uttam Phalnikar. The two had already built and sold a company together: Simility, a fraud prevention platform that PayPal bought for $120 million in 2018 (PayPal).
Fighting fraud at Google
Pangam, Phalnikar, and Kedar Samant were known for fraud-fighting and anti-abuse engineering at Google before they started Simility, according to its investor Accel. They had watched the shift online in the 2000s make fraud attacks more anonymous, larger, and more sophisticated (Accel).
Selling Simility to PayPal
As Simility’s chief executive, Pangam described the goal as an adaptive risk management platform for organizations operating in a digital world (PayPal). After the sale, its technology became part of PayPal’s global fraud detection operations (RapidCanvas).
A second company with the same partner
At RapidCanvas, Pangam sells custom AI with field engineers on a subscription. In October 2026 the company raised a $29 million Series B, and he said that getting AI into production reliably and safely is still the biggest gap (Series B announcement). Our RapidCanvas review covers its work.