Rajat Bhageria is the general director of Chef Robotics, a startup in San Francisco, who collected $ 20.5 million in the A series round to continue building artificially intelligent robots.
Thanks to the kindness of Robotics
Because the gastronomic industry is still fighting the shortages of workforce, the startup in the Silicon Valley has prepared artificially intelligent robots that are ready.
The chef Robotics collected $ 20.6 million in the A series financing round of Avataar Ventures, the company said CNBC. The round includes an additional 22.5 million dollars of the equipment financing debt to continue to build robotic startup installation systems.
The CEO of Rajat Bhageria and his team founded the company in 2019 in order to build robots that can help compensate for the lack of people in food processing plants, which often record high turnover due to the nature of work, forcing relying on temporary employees.
“There are rooms for hundreds of hundreds of people, they just collect food for eight hours a day in the 34-stage Fahrenheit room,” said Bhageria, whose startup is headquarters in San Francisco. “It's much more manual than even we expected.”
Robotic chefs are long arms with many joints that are wrapped in a protective cover. The arms hang from metal racks that sit next to the line for organizing food. This allows arms to collect various ingredients and spread them in packaged containers for meals similar to how people can. The robots are particularly suitable for connecting assembly lines in which people must make repetitive movements.
Chef Robotics builds long arms with many joints, which are wrapped in a protective cover. The arms hang from metal racks that sit next to the food massaging line and can collect various ingredients and spread them in packaged containers for meals.
Thanks to the kindness of Robotics
The variable nature of food preparation made it difficult for the industry to introduce more automation in the past. Bhageria said that the difference in food textures makes it difficult to serve the correct parts of food. Part of the problem resulted from a lack of training data to teach machines how to support various food products. A typical automated dispenser found in the processing plants – for example, those that can fill bottles with a drink of carbonated drinks – do not always meet the needs of the chef's clients.
“I can't just go to the internet and download training – how do you manipulate blueberry without crushing it?” Bhageria said. “It doesn't exist.”
To solve this, Chef Robotics builds its own training data to teach their robotic weapons, how to properly serve food, said Bhageria. Bhageria said that these “chefs” produced over 40 million meals.
Automation in the gastronomy industry is not a fully new concept, especially at the restaurant level, in which quick free chains, such as chipotle, sweetgreen and starbucks, have been investing in automation in the last few years to reverse burgers, mix salads and many others.
The chef Robotics on part of the assembly in the package in the industry allowed the team to build something that Bhageria called the “moat” of training data to add more ingredients when they expand their activities to a larger number of customers.
Thanks to the new cash infusion, the main goal of the chef is to extend to more plants and producers in the USA and Canada. Bhageria said that he also hopes to speed up the ability to learn robots, which means that the company can teach the robot arms how to perform the action, demonstrating them by the arm, and not writing the code that programms it.
