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A few yr ago , Chef Robotics was face potential death .
“ There were a lot of dark periods where I was mean of give up , ” father Rajat Bhageria tells TechCrunch of his six - yr - sometime company . But acquaintance and investors boost him , so he persevered .
Today , Chef Robotics has not only survived , it ’s one of the few food tech robotic party that is boom . The inauguration , which lately prove a $ 20.6 million Series A , has 40 employees and pavilion customers like Amy ’s Kitchen and Chef Bombay . Dozens of robots installed across the U.S. have made 45 million meals to date , Bhageria says .
This compares to a graveyard of bomb food technical school robotics society , includingChowbotics with its salad - make robot Sally;pizza delivery golem Zume ; food kiosk robotKarakuri , and , more recently , agtechSmall Robot Company .
Bhageria says he saved his ship’s company by doing something that former - stage founders dread to do : turning aside signed customers and millions of dollars in tax revenue .
The grasping problem
It all began when Bhageria did his master ’s degree in robotics atUPenn ’s celebrated GRASP Lab . He dreamed of the sci - fi promise reality where automaton did our housework , pout our lawns , and prepare us five - star dinners .
Such a world does n’t be yet because engineers have yet to fully solve the roboticgrasping job . civilize the same robot to wash a wine glass without crushing it and a cast iron pan without dropping it is a hard task .
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When it come to robotlike chefs , “ Nobody ’s built a dataset of how do you clean up a blueberry and not slosh it , or , how do you cull up cheese and not have it clump up ? ” he distinguish .
His original melodic theme with Chef Robotics was similar to the long - list of the robotics startups that go bad : a machinelike personal line of credit for fast effortless restaurants . That ’s an enormous industrywith a continuing employee shortfall .
“ We really had sign declaration . Like we had multimillion - buck signalise contract bridge . Obviously , we ’re not doing this anymore . So what happen ? ” he said . “ We basically could not lick the technological problem . ”
In those type of businesses , an employee completes an order by assembling all the varied ingredients necessary for each meal . These restaurants desire robots to replicate that process because the alternative is to have loads of robots dedicated to , and calibrated for , a exclusive ingredient , some of which may only be used once in a while ( we ’re search at you , anchovy ) .
But Bhageria and squad could n’t work up a successful pick - up - anything robot because the training information does n’t survive . He asked his likely client to allow him install robots for one or two constituent , gathering grooming datum and building from there . They said no .
Then Bhageria had an Three Kings' Day .
Instead of buy the farm bust trying to give exist customers what they wanted , mayhap he necessitate unlike customers . “ It frankly sucked , because I spend the last class and a half of my life strain to convince these masses , these fast daily company , to work up with us , ” he recalled .
Saying no leads to yes
It did n’t help that fundraising after 2021 was brutal . VCs were also looking at the graveyard . “ We talked to dozens of different funds , ” Bhageria said . “ We just got rejected over and over . ”
Bhageria was thinking of giving up . “ You amount home and are like , what am I doing in my living ? Am I doing the wrong matter ? Should I drop by the wayside ? ” he remembered .
But he get the picture in andin March , 2023 , raise an $ 11.2 million seed roundled by Construct Capital , while also landing checks from Promus Ventures , Kleiner Perkins , and Gaingels .
Bhageria and squad also found their perfect market , a part of the food industry known as “ high-pitched mixing manufacturing . ”
These are food makers that have many , many recipe , and make thousands of servings , but typically as meal or meal trays . For illustration ; salad and sandwich or main courses and side lulu . These are meal used by airlines and hospitals , etc . , or are frozen food meals for consumers .
Rather than one employee grabbing all the ingredient for each repast , “ high mix ” employees organise an assemblage strain . Each soul adds their individual ingredient to the tray repeatedly until the ordering is complete . Then they assemble the next recipe .
“ It ’s in reality C of humans who are stand in a 34 Fahrenheit way , and they ’re fundamentally take up food for eight hour a day , ” he describes . “ So it ’s just a terrible chore . ”
therefore , this manufacture has chronic labor shortage as well .
Robotics was n’t economically workable for them in the past times because of the variety of ingredients call for . But a inauguration building a whippy - ingredient bot , where the robots are work up in partnership with the nutrient maker , works .
Better still , “ as we learn how to do this chorizo , or we study pea , or this sauce , or these zucchinis , ” the bots get the existent - cosmos training information they want to finally serve fast - casual restaurants . Bhageria says this is still on his roadmap .
good of all , thanks to VC ’s reborn interest in all things AI , fundraising this time was “ weirdly ” slowly , Bhageria says .
Avataar Venture Partners , co - founded by former Norwest VC Mohan Kumar , was specifically look to fund “ AI in the physical human race ” startups and in reality pursued Chef Robotics , Bhageria says . He closed this stave in less than a month . Avataar run , with exist investors Construct Capital , Bloomberg Beta , and Promus Ventures piling in , among others .
And the process this time was “ exhilarating , ” he said .
Note : This chronicle was updated to reflect updated fairness and debt totality .
