Rick Pal, Class of 2008

Managing Partner 
Zuhnë

Rick Pal is an award-winning entrepreneur and investor. He is Managing Partner of Zuhnë, one of the fastest-growing brands in kitchen and bath fixtures. Pal’s experience spans clean-tech manufacturing with AirGenerate (licensed to Electrolux), retail service with Emprise (acquired by Liberty Tax Service), and senior roles with several high-tech firms—EnterpriseWorks (acquired by Iconnix), Commerce One (Nasdaq: CMRC), and Webify Solutions (acquired by IBM). He is also the founder of Innokul, the first privately-funded incubator for start-ups in eastern India and Ek Disha (now merged with America India Foundation), a non-profit that supports and facilitates high-impact sustainable projects in healthcare, education, and enterprise with a focus on South Asia. Pal is a limited partner at Houston Health Ventures, a seed-stage funder, and serves as a mentor for healthcare companies. His involvement in social ventures includes LegWorks, Wello Water, UE LifeSciences, KTK-BELT, and Embrace Global (merged with Thrive Networks). Pal has served as a mentor for start-ups at IIM Calcutta Innovation Park, GoodWorks Houston, the University of Houston (UH) MBA Club, Asia 21 Action Lab, and MIT’s Emerging Worlds. He created the Pal - Make a Difference Endowment at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) in 2006, which provides scholarships to students making a difference within their communities, and the Friends of India Studies Endowment at UH in 2015. Pal is a member of the Texas Union Advisory Council Board at UT Austin, UH College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Dean’s Advisory Board, and Fort Bend Education Foundation. He has also served on the City of Sugar Land’s Building Standards Commission; Fort Bend ISD Bond Committee; Asia Society Business Steering Committee; and Texas Exes Scholarship Committee. In April 2017, Pal summited Mera Peak, a 6476-meter mountain in the Himalayas. He is a TEDx speaker, Texas Next Generation Project Fellow, Indiaspora member, and a guest speaker at the UH Small Business Development Center Network (UH SBDC). He is a graduate of McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was the first two-term Chairman of The Texas Union.