Waud Capital Partners just filled a role it had never had before. On February 2, 2026, the firm named Prithvi Raj as its Chief AI and Data Officer, a brand-new position. The hire signals where Reeve Waud thinks the operating side of private equity is heading, and he’s putting a senior leader behind that view rather than treating it as a side experiment.

Raj will lead AI and advanced data capabilities across the firm and its portfolio companies. In practice that means he’ll work closely with both the investment team and the portfolio-operations team, so his fingerprints can land on new deals and existing companies alike.

Who Prithvi Raj Is

Raj arrives with an unusually wide span of experience. Most recently he was General Manager and Head of AI and Data at Newmark. Earlier in his career, roles were held at Microsoft, McKinsey and Company, and Zynga. That’s consumer tech, elite consulting, and enterprise software in one résumé, which is a rare combination in this seat.

His academic background matches that range. Raj holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton. Reeve Waud has built a firm that leans on specialists, and Raj brings both the engineering training to understand the tools and the operating time to know where they actually help.

Fitting the Human Capital Model

The appointment lines up neatly with how Reeve Waud has long described the firm. He’s said human capital is at the heart of everything the firm does, and Waud Capital keeps a five-person in-house team dedicated to executive recruiting and talent across its portfolio. Adding a data and AI leader stretches that thinking into fresh territory, and it was created as its own dedicated role rather than bolted onto someone’s existing job.

Reeve Waud’s healthcare roots give the move extra weight. He founded Acadia Healthcare in 2005, and building that company taught him how much operational rigor matters once a business starts to scale. Data and AI are the next layer of that rigor. For the portfolio companies Reeve Waud backs across healthcare and software, a dedicated leader on these questions could change how quickly they grow and how confidently they make decisions. Better forecasting, sharper diligence, smarter operations: those are the areas where the work is expected to pay off. The position was created so that no portfolio company has to build that capability entirely on its own. It’s a bet that data capability compounds across the whole book, not just one deal.