Chef Robotics, headquartered in San Francisco, has raised $7.7 million in pre-seed and seed investment to help simplify certain areas of food production. Kleiner Perkins, Promus Ventures, Build, Bloomberg Beta, BOLD Capital Partners, Red and Blue Ventures, Gaingels, Schox VC, Stewart Alsop, and Tau Ventures are among the investors on this one (with seed and pre-seed rolled into one).
A global pandemic that lasted nearly a year and a half has had a significant effect on almost every segment of the workforce. Food prep isn’t quite at the top of the list when it comes to potential automation (for the time being, that honor goes to warehouse fulfillment), but it’s definitely near. It’s easy to see why the events of 2020 and beyond have prompted many kitchens to search for new staff.
Ex-employees from Cruise, Google, Verb Surgical, Zoox, and Strateos make up the product team. Chef Robotics team isn’t quite ready to show off its robot just yet, which is to be expected from a startup robotics company, hence the generic kitchen stock photo #8952 up top. So far, it’s outlined a robotics and vision framework aimed at the production volume and consistency while reducing food waste. This type of technology seems to be primarily focused on fast casual restaurants.
It’s defined this way by the company:
Chef is designed to emulate human versatility, enabling customers to manage tens of thousands of different types of food with minimal hardware adjustments. Chef accomplishes this by using artificial intelligence, which can learn to manage a growing number of ingredients over time while also improving. Customers will do things like change their menu on a regular basis as a result of this. Chef’s modular design also helps customers to scale up as easily as they can by adding more employees (but unlike humans, Chef never misses a beat and never takes a break).
Hopefully, more information on the underlying technology will become available shortly.
