Waud Capital Partners operates at the intersection of two industries that could not be more different on the surface. One demands regulatory precision and clinical rigor. The other moves fast and breaks things. Yet Reeve Waud, the firm’s Managing Partner and founder, has spent three decades building a thesis around a simple observation: the best operational insights flow in both directions.
The appointment of Prithvi Raj as Chief AI and Data Officer in February 2026 crystallizes something Reeve Waud and the firm have understood for years. A centralized AI leader isn’t a luxury for a multi-sector shop. It’s how you extract the real value from having your hands in both healthcare and software. Raj brings exactly the kind of cross-industry perspective that makes this possible. His background spans Newmark (where he led AI and data strategy), SquareFoot (where he served as CEO), Microsoft, McKinsey, and Zynga. He’s seen enterprise software, consumer technology, and real estate optimization. That’s the kind of roaming mind this job requires.
The Two-Sector Advantage
Healthcare and software businesses face strikingly similar operational challenges wrapped in different vocabularies. Both deal with scale-related problems: how to maintain quality while expanding. Both grapple with talent retention in competitive markets. Both generate mountains of data and struggle to turn it into something actionable. A healthcare platform might wrestle with patient outcomes while a SaaS company battles churn. Different problems, same underlying machinery of analytics and prediction.
Reeve Waud has invested in more than 500 platforms and follow-on transactions over the firm’s three-decade history. That’s 500 opportunities to ask: what worked? What didn’t? Why did this team scale faster than that one? A software company that solved a supply chain problem in 2015 might offer the template for a medical device portfolio company facing distribution challenges in 2025. A healthcare operator’s playbook for staff scheduling could reshape how a software team thinks about productivity and burnout. These patterns are invisible unless someone is explicitly looking for them.
Prithvi Raj‘s role creates the infrastructure for that cross-pollination to happen systematically. He works alongside investment, portfolio operations, and management teams across both sectors. He’s not sitting in one vertical; he’s the connective tissue.
Why Centralized AI Leadership Matters at Waud Capital
The private equity industry has caught on to something obvious: AI and data strategy can’t be an afterthought bolted onto your deal underwriting or your portfolio operations. It has to be baked in from day one. Last year, 84 percent of PE firms appointed a Chief AI or Data Officer. That’s not trendy anymore. That’s table stakes.
But hiring the role is one thing. Structuring it so the AI leader actually moves the needle is another. Reeve Waud’s bet is that the person in this position needs to work across the whole firm, not sit isolated in one department. Raj will partner with the teams sourcing deals, the people evaluating targets, the operations leaders integrating acquisitions, and the management teams running portfolio companies. Each of those groups collects different signals and asks different questions. A unified AI perspective that pulls insights from the healthcare side and the software side and asks what’s universal is how you avoid hiring a CAIO who becomes a glorified spreadsheet formatter.
The firm has raised roughly 3.2 billion dollars in capital commitments over its history and typically deploys equity checks in the 75 to 200 million dollar range per investment. That scale demands sophisticated decision-making at every stage. Reeve Waud’s conviction, as the Managing Partner put it, is that “AI and data are now foundational to building market-leading businesses.” That statement could be generic boardroom speak. The February appointment suggests the firm actually means it.
The Operating Experience Dimension
Hiring Prithvi Raj signals something else worth noting. This isn’t a Ph.D. statistician or a career consultant brought in to build models. Raj was the Chief Executive Officer of SquareFoot. He’s actually run a company. He’s sat in budget meetings and dealt with payroll during downturns. He’s felt the pressure of unit economics. That operator’s perspective matters enormously when walking into a PE firm and saying: “Here’s how data should reshape decision-making.”
A CAIO without operating experience tends to oversell what analytics can do. An operator knows where analytics actually saves time and where it just creates more meetings. Raj has both perspectives: he knows what the C-suite needs and he knows the difference between a useful insight and an interesting finding.