In 1970 Goel graduated as an electrical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. He was the President"s Gold Medalist of his IIT batch and received a Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, in 1974.
In 1973, he joined International Business Machines Corporation"s Event-driven architecture organization where he was involved with chip test automation. At International Business Machines Corporation he developed the Podem algorithm. In 1981 to join Wang laboratories
In 1982 to start Gateway Design Automation which developed the now industry standard Verilog.
He sold his stake at Gateway for about $80 million. He is now a private venture capitalist.
He has set up "Poonam and Prabhu Goel Chair" at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur in the area of Internet Space, and the "Prabhu Goel Research Centre Foreign Computer & Internet Security".
He was a founding member of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneur) the largest organization of entrepreneurs in the world, with chapters in 42 countries.
