Chef Robotics has raised $43.1 million in a Sequence A spherical to speed up deployment of its AI-powered meals meeting robots, the corporate introduced as we speak. The funding brings the San Francisco-based startup’s whole capital to over $65 million, together with tools financing. Avataar led the spherical, with participation from Assemble Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and others.
Based in 2019, Chef Robotics is constructing what founder and CEO Rajat Bhageria calls an “AI platform for meals.” Quite than constructing a single-purpose robotic, Chef’s system is designed to work in numerous meals manufacturing environments—studying and adapting by means of software program to new duties like portioning, topping, or filling.
After I first received a peek at Chef’s system final 12 months, I used to be intrigued as a result of the corporate had struck a stability that appeared to elude many meals robotics startups. Whereas startups on this house appeared to make both high-volume options with restricted customizability or use off-the-shelf robotic arms that aren’t made for true high-production, Chef has constructed a versatile and scalable robotics platform that may be custom-made for any variety of high-volume meals manufacturing environments.
That’s as a result of whereas many robotics firms focus totally on {hardware}, Chef’s method facilities on a software program layer that permits “Embodied AI”—giving bodily robots the intelligence to function autonomously in real-world situations. Chef’s system combines a robotic arm with AI fashions educated on tens of millions of real-world examples. These fashions, powered by manufacturing information from early prospects like Amy’s Kitchen and Recent Prep, enable the robots to generalize throughout new components and dishes. So far, Chef Robotics has helped assemble over 40 million meals.
From the corporate’s announcement: After we thought of beginning with eating places, we bumped into the rooster and egg downside – to allow robots which can be versatile sufficient so as to add worth, we’d like a extremely succesful AI, however to get a extremely succesful AI, we’d like real-world coaching information from the shopper websites…. Thus, we determined to initially deploy robots in high-mix (learn as extremely versatile) meals manufacturing and manufacturing environments the place Chef might partially automate a meals operation and thus add worth in manufacturing to prospects with out requiring 100% full autonomy from the get-go. We constructed Chef’s methods on fashionable developments in AI to make them extremely versatile and adaptable sufficient to “choose” and plate virtually any ingredient, irrespective of the way it’s reduce, cooked, or grown; this makes them a super resolution for assembling or plating meals. Â
The brand new capital will assist scaling up deployments and constructing out Chef’s gross sales and advertising groups. The corporate is presently energetic within the U.S. and Canada, with plans to develop into the UK subsequent 12 months.
