Just a few years in the past, Lance Lentini was a yr out of faculty when he began working at DEKA Analysis & Growth, a know-how improvement agency. This wasn’t simply any engineering agency; it was the incubation hub for Dean Kamen, one among America’s most famed inventors, chargeable for a plethora of innovations such because the Segway, the iBOT wheelchair, and the shelling out know-how used within the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine.
And it was there, whereas engaged on tasks like self-balancing wheelchairs and supply drones, that Lentini began to consider how automation may very well be used to make meals manufacturing extra environment friendly. He and a few coworkers began to debate the alternatives and began to think about what it may be prefer to work on their very own undertaking below their very own firm.
The one query was, the place ought to they begin?
In line with Lentini, it was in 2020 that the idea for his or her first product began to return collectively. Round that point, Lentini and his eventual co-founders have been standing in line for espresso and began to surprise what the explanation was for the lengthy wait instances.
“After watching folks simply stroll away from the road after ready so lengthy, we have been like, ‘let’s poke and prod and see what’s actually happening, what’s the most important drawback behind the counter,’” mentioned Lentini in an interview with The Spoon.
After speaking to workers on the espresso store, they discovered that eggs have been usually the bottleneck within the kitchen on account of how labor-intensive they’re to make. It was then they noticed a chance to innovate.
“That was the place we went down the rabbit gap of designing for restaurant homeowners,” Lentini mentioned.
Lentini took the primary leap. He left DEKA and commenced engaged on the thought, and inside a couple of months, he obtained a small funding from an in depth pal. Earlier than lengthy, he was joined by his different co-founders (Connor White, Keller Waldron, and Chris Plankey) and constructed their first prototype. This prototype helped them increase a $2 million seed spherical in 2021 from Steve Papa, a longtime wi-fi trade government and one of many authentic traders in Toast.
After two years of improvement, the corporate, now known as Bridge Home equipment, finalized its first product late final yr, a robotic designed to automate the preparation of eggs for breakfast sandwiches named OMM. Final month, the corporate was granted a utility patent for the know-how within the OMM, which covers the method of cooking an egg in an end-to-end trend in a countertop equipment.
The OMM can put together two eggs in about two minutes, which implies a single machine can deal with roughly 60 eggs in an hour. The plan is to put the machines each at smaller mom-and-pop outlets that may solely make fifty eggs on a Saturday morning to higher-volume places that do three to 5 hundred eggs in a day. These higher-volume places, Lentini says, may have two or three machines working side-by-side.
Bridge Home equipment has arrange manufacturing within the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, space, and so they plan on rolling out the OMM to a set of trial prospects over the subsequent few months. From there, the corporate plans to broaden into different areas throughout the US by the tip of 2024 and early 2025. The preliminary enterprise mannequin can be a “cooking-as-a-service” mannequin, and Lentini says Bridge will cost a nominal payment on a per-egg-cooked foundation.
Together with his first merchandise heading out the door, Lentini can mirror on these early days working as a freshly graduated engineer for a know-how pioneer like Dean Kamen.
“A part of the explanation we wished to do that is that we simply noticed such an absence of innovation on this sector,” Lentini mentioned. “And we have been impressed by Dean’s curiosity and willingness to essentially attempt to do moonshots, and we actually wished to provide this a attempt to construct the primary sort of end-to-end robotic home equipment.”
“And we went, and we tried it, and it labored out.”
You will get a peak on the OMM robotic egg cooker within the video beneath.
