We’ve been monitoring Chef Robotics earlier than it was even referred to as that when the corporate’s CEO and founder, Rajat Bhageria, spoke at The Spoon’s meals robotics convention ArticulATE in 2019.
On the time, Bhageria was nonetheless in stealth on what would turn into his restaurant robotic firm, however he had hinted that he was as much as one thing after we talked to him and satisfied him to return and communicate on the convention as an investor for his funding shingle, Prototype Capital. Since that point, Chef Robotics has exited stealth and the corporate is definitely promoting its robotic (Bhageria says that firm income has doubled between 2022 and 2023) and, as first reported by Techcrunch, the corporate has raised a brand new $14.75 million combo debt/fairness spherical of funding.
From Techcrunch: Rajat Bhageria tells TechCrunch that Chef distinguishes itself from the likes of Miso by specializing in meals meeting, moderately than cooking particularly. The corporate can be touting ChefOS, the underlying software program driving its robotic arm’s selections. “[F]ood could be very extremely dimensional: relying on the way you prep the components (e.g., julienned onions vs chopped), prepare dinner the components (e.g., sauteed, baked, broiled), retailer the components (e.g., cooked, room temp, frozen), the fabric properties radically differ,” the corporate notes. “And these properties change each day based mostly on who’s prepping and cooking. To cope with this, Chef makes use of numerous sensors – like cameras – to gather coaching information after which trains fashions that assist Chef discover ways to manipulate a big corpus of components.”
When he spoke at ArticulATE in 2019, Bhageria mentioned the significance of higher and cheaper pc imaginative and prescient and the rising energy of AI to assist energy helpful robots in meals service and past.
“In my head, pc imaginative and prescient is absurdly vital right here,” stated Bhageria. Now you have got higher sensors with cameras, higher computation with GPUs, cloud computing, and deep neural networks, and higher actuation.”
You’ll be able to watch the meals robotics panel with Bhageria and different meals tech traders beneath.
