A few years ago, Chefrobotics was facing a potential death.
“There were a lot of dark times when I was thinking about giving up,” founder Rajat Bhageria tells the six-year-old company TechCrunch. However, friends and investors encouraged him, so he endured.
Today, Chef Robotics is one of the few FoodTech robotics companies that not only survived, but also thriving. The startup, which recently raised a $23 million Series A, has 40 employees and marquee customers, including Amy’s Kitchen and Chef Bombay. Dozens of robots installed throughout the US have made 45 million meals so far, Bhageria said.
This is compared to the cemetery of a failed Foodtech robotics company that includes Chowbotics with Saladaming Robotics Sally. Pizza delivery robot Zume; Food Kiosk Robot Karakuri, and more recently the Agtech Small Robot Company.
Bhageria says she saved the company by doing what the early-stage founders feared.
Issues to grasp
It all began when Bhageria completed her Masters in Robotics from the famous Grasp Lab in Upenn. He dreamed of a world where science fiction was promised, where robots did our chores, mowed our lawns and cooked five-star dinners.
Such a world does not exist yet, as engineers have not yet fully solved robot grasping problems. Training the same robot to wash a wine glass without crushing it and washing a cast iron pot without dropping it is a difficult task.
As for the robot chef, “No one has built a data set of how to pick up blueberries and not crush them. He explains.
His original ideas at Chef Robotics were similar to the long list of dead robotics startups: the casual restaurant robot line. It’s a huge industry with a chronic shortage of employees.
“We were actually signing a contract, like we had a multi-million dollar signing agreement. Obviously, we’re not doing this anymore. So what happened?” he said. “We weren’t able to solve the technical issues basically.”
In these types of companies, employees complete their orders by assembling all the different ingredients needed for each meal. These restaurants want the robots to replicate the process. This means using only one process as you have dozens of robots dedicated to a single material and calibrate them. (We’re looking at you, anchovies).
However, Bhageria and his team were unable to build a successful pickup robot due to the absence of training data. He asked potential customers to install a robot of one or two materials, collect training data and build it from it. They said no.
After that, Bagelia had an inspiration.
Rather than trying to give existing customers what they wanted, he probably needed a different customer. “I smoked honestly because I spent half of my life last year trying to convince these fast casual companies to work with us,” he recalled.
Saying no leads to yes
It didn’t help that funding after 2021 was cruel. The VC also looked at the cemetery. “We talked to dozens of different funds,” Bagelia said. “We were rejected over and over again.”
Bagelia was thinking about giving up. “You go home and what are you doing in my life? Am I doing something wrong? Should I stop?” he recalled.
However, he dug up in March 2023, bringing together a $11.2 million seed round led by Construct Capital, and at the same time he also got landing checks from Proms Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Gaingel.
Bhageria and Team have also found the perfect market, part of the food industry known as “High Mix Manufacturing.”
These are food makers with many recipes and serve thousands of people, but are usually used as meals and meal trays. For example; salad and sandwiches or main courses and side dishes. These are meals used by airlines, hospitals, etc., or frozen foods for consumers.
Instead of one employee grabbing all the ingredients in each meal, the “high mix” employee forms the assembly line. Each person repeatedly adds individual ingredients to the tray until the order is complete. Then assemble the following recipe:
“In fact, there are hundreds of people standing in a room of 34 Fahrenheit, and they essentially scooped up food for eight hours a day,” he explains. “So it’s just a terrible job.”
As a result, there is also a chronic labor shortage in the industry.
Robotics have not been economically feasible in the past due to the diverse materials involved. But startups that build flexible, iconic bots that are built in collaboration with food makers will work.
Better yet, “as you learn how to learn this chorizo, or peas, this sauce, or these zucchini” bots will eventually get the real-world training data needed to serve a high-speed casual restaurant. Bhageria says this is still on his roadmap.
Above all, the VC’s reincarnated interest in everything, Bhageria said this time’s fundraising was “oddly” easy.
Avataar Venture Partners, co-founded by former Norwest VC Mohan Kumar, was particularly looking to fund “AI in the physical world” startups, and in fact pursued chef robotics, says Bhageria. He closed the round less than a month later. Avataar has built up capital, Bloomberg beta, and Promus Ventures, among other things.
The new funding will increase the chef’s total to $308.8 million. He also signed a $26.75 million loan to raise equipment funding from the Silicon Valley Bank.
And he said the process was “exhilarating.”