Cala, a maker of autonomous pasta-robot restaurants, announced it has raised a €5.5M Seed funding round led by BACKED VC, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The new funding follows a €1M angel round raised in 2019 by the Paris-based startup.
Cala’s robot is essentially a fully operational restaurant in a box. It preps and cooks pasta, plates it, and cleans up afterward using a cartesian coordinate system robot. While the company is on its gen-2 robot, you can get an idea of how the Cala bot works by watching the video of the gen one below. The current generation machine can prepare up to 400 pasta dishes in one hour.
The company opened its first robot restaurant in Paris’ fifth arrondissement district in 2020 and, according to Cala, they’ve dished up 25 thousand servings of pasta so far. Customers can order their pasta at the kiosk using the touchscreen or through meal delivery apps like UberEats or Deliveroo. Interestingly, the company says about 95 percent of the meals made so far have gone to customers who ordered through delivery.
Cofounder and CEO Ylan Richard, who dropped out of college in 2017 at age nineteen to start the company with cofounders Julien Drago and Nicolas Barboni, said he was motivated to build his pasta robot restaurant because he was frustrated by the lack of affordable and healthy meals available to him as a student.
“Through our research, and driven by our own stomachs, we could see that the foodservice industry is broken,” said Richard in the announcement. “In fast food, the low-profit margin means that it’s impossible to use higher quality ingredients. We realized that if you could automate the meal preparation, you could rapidly increase the number of meals being produced and improve the economics.”
In some ways, Richard’s motivation echoes that of Now Cuisine’s Adam Lloyd Cohen, who started thinking about using automation as a way to democratize good food while also studying in Paris (what’s with France and food robots?).
The company plans to use the new funding to expand to new locations in France and around Europe. The company is also looking to add more employees across its engineering, product and operations teams.
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