Uttam Phalnikar is co-founder and chief technology officer of RapidCanvas, the Austin, Texas, managed AI company. He and Rahul Pangam earlier co-founded Simility, a fraud prevention platform that PayPal acquired in 2018 (RapidCanvas).
Anti-abuse engineering at Google
Phalnikar, Pangam, and Kedar Samant worked on fraud and anti-abuse engineering at Google before starting Simility, according to its investor Accel (Accel). PayPal paid $120 million in cash for the company (PayPal), and its technology was folded into PayPal’s global fraud detection work (RapidCanvas).
Building the RapidCanvas platform
As chief technology officer, Phalnikar leads the platform behind RapidCanvas’s service: a context engine that records how a business process runs, a visual canvas where engineers build applications from tested skills, and a harness that monitors them in production (Series B announcement). More than 75 enterprises made 1.4 million AI-led decisions with those applications in 2026. Our RapidCanvas review covers its scores.