In recent years, the kitchen has increasingly become a focal point for the world of automation. Miso, for example, has become famous with Flippy, a hamburger cooking arm that has found its way into chain restaurants like White Castle. Others, including Zume Robotics, have been less successful – the robot pizza company closed its doors last year after attempting a major spin on Earth-conscious food packaging.
Chef Robotics started in 2019. The founding was decidedly coincidental, right before the Covid-related shutdowns and resulting labor shortages that continue to this day in industries like fast food. This week, the San Francisco-based company announced that it closed a combined equity/debt round of $14.75 million.
The new cash infusion follows a $7.7 million raise in January 2021, bringing total funding to $22.5 million. That amount includes $18.2 million in equity and $4.25 million in debt. MaC Venture Capital, MFV Partners, Interwoven Ventures and Alumni Ventures joined existing backers Construct Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Promus Ventures and Red and Blue Ventures.
Much of the money will go towards developing Chef’s go-to-market strategy, which is based on a RaaS design. Robotics as a Service is proving to be an extremely popular model in the world of industrial automation, as the initial cost of a large robot is prohibitive for many companies. The company will also hire engineers and technicians, adding to a workforce that currently numbers around 30
Rajat Bhageria tells TechCrunch that Chef differentiates itself from Miso by focusing on food assembly rather than cooking specifically. The company is also touting ChefOS, the underlying software that drives its robot arm’s decisions. “[F]od has very large dimensions: depending on how the ingredients are prepared (e.g. julienned vs. chopped onions), cook the ingredients (e.g. sauteed, baked, grilled), store the ingredients (e.g. cooked, room temperature, frozen), the properties of the material differ radically,” notes the company. “And those qualities change daily depending on who is preparing and cooking. To address this, Chef uses various sensors – such as cameras – to collect training data and then trains models that help Chef learn how to handle a large set of ingredients.”
Part of the reason the company is putting such an emphasis on the software/AI side of things is that most of Chef’s hardware components are off-the-shelf. There is, after all, a philosophy among many roboticists that if existing solutions do the job, there’s no need to reinvent that particular wheel.
The chef does not disclose specific sales figures, saying only that it has “robot to food companies in five cities in the US and Canada,” including “Fortune 500 food companies.” Bhageria also tells TechCrunch that it has quadrupled “recurring revenue from 2022 to 2023,” though, again, nothing more specific than that.
