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Ravin Thambapillai
Co-founder and CEO · Credal
Enterprise AI governance Data security
Thambapillai is building the control layer that decides what company AI assistants may read and change, drawing on seven years of putting sensitive data to work at Palantir.
Ravin Thambapillai is co-founder and CEO of Credal, a New York City software company whose platform connects AI assistants to internal tools and data under central policy, approval steps, and audit logs. He started it with Jack Fischer, a fellow Palantir alum, and the pair went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch.
Oxford, Self-Taught Code, and Early-Stage Startups
Thambapillai studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford and taught himself to code, according to TechCrunch. His Y Combinator profile lists early jobs at Google and at two companies he joined at Series A: THG, the British e-commerce group, and the payments company GoCardless. Credal’s team page notes that THG later went public and that GoCardless became a unicorn.
Pandemic Data at Palantir
He then spent seven years at Palantir building AI-powered systems for large financial institutions, life sciences companies, and public health agencies, according to Credal’s team page.
On his Y Combinator profile he describes the public health work: “I led the building of significant parts of America’s emergency-public-health infrastructure, including what Atlantic Magazine called ‘America’s most reliable Pandemic data.’”
From a Decision Assistant to Credal
Thambapillai and Fischer met at Palantir and bonded over security and compliance, TechCrunch reported in October 2023. Their first product was a decision-making assistant that read documents to help executives make choices, and it changed into a way to connect internal company data to outside language models.
Fischer explained the shift to TechCrunch: “We realized that, with our backgrounds in enterprise data security and AI from Palantir, we were in a unique position from which to build an AI data platform that enterprises could actually trust.” The same article reported a $4.8 million seed round led by Spark Capital.
Governing How AI Assistants Use Company Systems
Credal now sells a platform for building and governing MCP servers, the connections that let assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor call company tools. Its gateway can allow a tool, deny it, or require a person to approve each use, and its homepage shows customers including Wise, MongoDB, Checkr, and Comcast.
