Robotics chef raises $ 20.6 million to continue building AI Robot Arms

As the food service industry continues to fight with the shortage of work, a Silicon Valley startup has gathered artificially intelligent robots that are ready to register.

Chef Robotics has raised $ 20.6 million in a round of financing from Serie A directed by Avataar Ventures, the company told CNBC. The round includes an additional debt of $ 22.5 million in the financing of equipment to continue building the Robotic Meetings of the Startup.

The CEO Rajat Bhazeria and its team founded the company in 2019 with the aim of building robots that can help compensate for the lack of human workers in food processing plants, which often see high rotation due to the nature of work, which forces to depend on temporary workers.

“There are rooms from hundreds of hundreds of people, they are only collecting food for eight hours a day in a 34 degree Fahrenheit room,” said Bhageria, whose startup is based on San Francisco. “It is much more manual than we expected.”

Robotic chefs are long arms with multiple joints that are wrapped in a protective cover. The arms hang from the metal racks that sit next to the food assembly lines. This allows the arms to collect different ingredients and extend them in pre -envided food containers in a similar way to the way in which human workers could. Robots are particularly suitable for joining assembly lines where humans have to make repetitive movements.

The variable nature of food preparation has made it difficult to introduce more automation in the past. The difference in food textures makes it difficult for machines to serve the correct portions of food, Bhageria said. Part of the problem arose from the lack of training data to teach machines how to handle different foods. A typical automated dispenser found in processing plants, such as those that can fill bottles with soft drinks, for example, do not always meet the needs of chef robotics.

“I can’t go to the Internet and download training data: how do you manipulate a blueberry without crushing it?” Bhageria said. “That does not exist.”

To solve this, Chef Robotics is building your own training data to teach your robotic arms how to serve food correctly, Bhageria said. Already, these “chefs” have produced more than 40 million meals, Bhageria said.

Automation in the food service industry is not a completely new concept, particularly at the restaurant level, where fast informal chains such as Chipotle, Sweetgreen and Starbucks have been investing largely in automation in recent years to turn hamburgers, mix salads and more.

The chef Robotics approach in the pre -impeded industry industry has allowed the team to build what Bherreria called a “pit” of training data to add more ingredients as they expand their business to more customers.

With the new cash infusion, the main objective of chef Robotics is to expand to more plants and manufacturers in the United States and Canada. Bhageria said he also hopes to accelerate the imitation learning capabilities of the robots, which means that the company could teach the robot’s weapons how to perform an action demonstrating it to the arm instead of writing code that schedule it.

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