RapidCanvas has raised $29M in a Series B round and will use part of the money to put more of its AI engineers to work inside the companies it serves. Vertex Ventures SEA & India, a venture firm that backs startups across Southeast Asia and India, led the round.
Hitachi Ventures, the corporate venture arm of the Japanese group Hitachi, joined as a new investor. Accel, Peak XV Partners, Valley Capital Partners and Titanium Ventures, which had all backed the Austin, Texas startup before, took part again. The round brings its total funding to $52.5M.
RapidCanvas calls itself a managed AI execution company. Put simply, it sells AI software along with the people who make it work. Its field AI engineers learn how a customer runs a process, build the applications and stay responsible for the results once those tools are live. Its website calls this mix of an AI platform and human experts its Hybrid Approach.
Rahul Pangam, the co-founder and chief executive, tied the round to who gets the benefit of AI. “AI can be the great equalizer, but so far its biggest wins have gone to the Fortune 100,” he said, meaning the largest American companies. He added: “Getting AI into production reliably and safely still remains the biggest gap.”
Where The New Money Will Go
RapidCanvas plans to grow its sales and marketing teams and widen its network of private equity and advisory partners, the firms that could bring it into the companies they own or advise. It will also hire more field AI engineers in the United States, Brazil and India.
Its three products get a share of the money too. The Enterprise Context Engine records how a business process actually runs, and the customer, not RapidCanvas, owns that record. On the Visual Development Canvas, engineers draw on a stock of tested building blocks, which the company says puts each new project 60% of the way there before work starts. The Operational Harness keeps watch over the AI tools after they go live.
Growth Figures Behind The Round
RapidCanvas says its annual recurring revenue, the yearly value of its ongoing contracts, grew eightfold over the past six quarters. It has not said what that revenue amounts to in dollars.
More than 75 enterprises in manufacturing, financial services, retail, business services and infrastructure have used applications built on its platform this year, the company says. Those applications have made 1.4M AI-led decisions in 2026, and more than 40% of its customers now use AI for more than one job in their day-to-day operations.
Logos on its website include the German machinery maker GEA, the oilfield equipment company NOV, the Mexican cable operator Megacable and the Caterpillar dealer Milton CAT. In one result the company highlights, the shopping platform atolls cut the time it spends matching invoices by 90%.
Hitachi Joins Four Returning Backers
“Enterprise AI will ultimately be measured by the economics of delivering outcomes at scale,” said Radhika Ananth, head of India and investment director at Hitachi Ventures. She said RapidCanvas moves what starts as custom work towards the economics of software, rather than those of a services business.
Piyush Kharbanda, a general partner at Vertex Ventures SEA & India, pointed to customers coming back for more. “Most enterprises are still searching for real returns on their AI spend,” he said. “The proof is in the customer pull: enterprises keep expanding into new use cases and functions.”
The earlier backers all came in during 2024. Accel led a $7.5M round in March that year, with Valley Capital Partners joining, and Peak XV led a $16M Series A in December, when Titanium Ventures came in as a new investor.
Founders Who Sold Simility To PayPal
Pangam started RapidCanvas in 2021 with Uttam Phalnikar. The two had built Simility before that, a company selling software that helps businesses spot fraud and make risk decisions in real time. PayPal agreed to buy Simility for $120M in cash in 2018, when Pangam was its co-founder and chief executive.
Kharbanda said Vertex was backing “a team that has built and scaled this playbook before”.
Big Services Firms Chase The Same Gap
Much larger information technology services groups are going after the same buyers. Cognizant set up Activate, a unit that sells packaged data, AI and security offerings to companies with $1B to $5B in yearly revenue, months after Accenture opened a similar arm.
Kyndryl, the infrastructure services company, has opened an AI lab in Frisco, outside Dallas, that aims to take clients from an idea to a working prototype within days. RapidCanvas works at a far smaller scale and leans more on software it owns. It says more than 60% of each project now comes ready-made from its library, and that projects go live 70% faster than a year ago.
Where RapidCanvas Goes From Here
RapidCanvas moves into its next stage with new money from Vertex and Hitachi Ventures and fresh support from all four of its earlier backers. The growth, customer and project figures behind the round are the company’s own, and it has kept its revenue in dollars private.
Its plan is to put more engineers in the field across three countries and keep building the software that lets each project start from parts already made. Pangam and Phalnikar have taken a company to a sale before. This time they are building around the gap Pangam describes, between trying AI and running it every day.
