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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Food Assembly Robot Startup Chef Robotics Raises $43M Series A as it Reaches 40 Million Meal Milestone

Chef Robotics has raised $43.1 million in a Series A round to accelerate deployment of its AI-powered food assembly robots, the company announced today. The funding brings the San Francisco-based startup’s total capital to over $65 million, including equipment financing. Avataar led the round, with participation from Construct Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and others.

Founded in 2019, Chef Robotics is building what founder and CEO Rajat Bhageria calls an “AI platform for food.” Rather than building a single-purpose robot, Chef’s system is designed to work in diverse food production environments—learning and adapting through software to new tasks like portioning, topping, or filling.

When I first got a peek at Chef’s system last year, I was intrigued because the company had struck a balance that seemed to elude many food robotics startups. While startups in this space seemed to make either high-volume solutions with limited customizability or use off-the-shelf robotic arms that aren’t made for true high-production, Chef has built a flexible and scalable robotics platform that can be customized for any number of high-volume food production environments.

That’s because while many robotics companies focus primarily on hardware, Chef’s approach centers on a software layer that enables “Embodied AI”—giving physical robots the intelligence to operate autonomously in real-world conditions. Chef’s system combines a robotic arm with AI models trained on millions of real-world examples. These models, powered by production data from early customers like Amy’s Kitchen and Fresh Prep, allow the robots to generalize across new ingredients and dishes. To date, Chef Robotics has helped assemble over 40 million meals.

From the company’s announcement: When we thought about starting with restaurants, we ran into the chicken and egg problem – to enable robots that are flexible enough to add value, we need a highly capable AI, but to get a highly capable AI, we need real-world training data from the customer sites…. Thus, we decided to initially deploy robots in high-mix (read as highly flexible) food production and manufacturing environments where Chef could partially automate a food operation and thus add value in production to customers without requiring 100% full autonomy from the get-go. We built Chef’s systems on modern advancements in AI to make them highly flexible and adaptable enough to “pick” and plate almost any ingredient, no matter how it’s cut, cooked, or grown; this makes them an ideal solution for assembling or plating food.  

The new capital will support scaling up deployments and building out Chef’s sales and marketing teams. The company is currently active in the U.S. and Canada, with plans to expand into the UK next year.

Bridge Appliances Deploys Egg-Making Robot at First Customer

Five years ago, the cofounders behind Bridge Appliances stood in line at a busy breakfast cafe. As minutes ticked by, frustration turned into inspiration. They wondered: What if the preparation of eggs could be automated? That simple question led to the creation of OMM, a countertop egg-making robot. Now, half a decade later, the Bridge team is back in a coffee shop, deploying their robot for their very first commercial customer, Beantrust Coffeebar in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Bridge cofounder Connor White recently described spending the past two months embedded at Beantrust, collaborating closely with owner Erik Modahl and his team. According to White, working alongside baristas, listening to customers, and absorbing the café’s unique culture and operational flow allowed Bridge to tailor OMM’s integration precisely to Beantrust’s specific needs.

As I wrote last year, OMM cooks two eggs in roughly two minutes, enabling Beantrust to serve around 60 eggs an hour. White notes they’ve already seen promising results, with the new sandwich lineup boosting average ticket values by 15%. Currently, one in five customers chooses to add a freshly made sandwich to their coffee order (and that number continues to climb).

This marks a significant milestone for Bridge, which raised $2 million in seed funding from Steve Papa, one of Toast’s earliest investors, in 2021. Moving forward, Bridge is likely to see more growth among small coffee shops or similar establishments that lack full kitchens or grill cooks but still wish to offer breakfast. However, they will need to raise considerably more funding to scale effectively, or they could be a potential attractive acquisition candidate for a company such as Middleby.

Fast-Growing Restaurant Chain MOTO Pizza Is Building an End-to-End Pizza Robot

Last month in Las Vegas, we sat down with one of our favorite restaurateurs, Lee Kindell of MOTO Pizza, to discuss his vision for the future of restaurants. Lee was in town to speak onstage at CES about the industry’s direction, so we made sure to catch up with him for a one-on-one interview.

One revelation that surprised us during our conversation was that MOTO is developing an end-to-end pizza robot—one that automates the entire process, from dough preparation to boxing the finished pizza.

“Our robot is going to be fully autonomous,” Kindell explained. “It takes the pizza from refrigeration, brings it out, proofs it, tops it, cooks it, finishes it, cuts it, and boxes it. So that’s what we’re building right now. It’s truly end-to-end, and that’s what excites me the most.”

As someone who loves both pizza and robotics, I was intrigued by MOTO’s move to develop its own technology. To clarify, I asked Kindell directly about his plans. He confirmed that MOTO is indeed building a fully automated pizza-making solution—one that could potentially integrate with existing automation partners, such as Picnic (Picnic’s pizza robot adds sauce, cheese, and toppings but doesn’t handle cooking, cutting, or boxing).

MOTO has been expanding rapidly, entering new cities and sports venues. Kindell, who started as a hands-on pizzaiolo mixing dough by hand, became a firm believer in automation after an arm injury forced him to adopt a mixer. That moment reshaped his perspective—he realized that automation wasn’t just about efficiency; it was a tool to scale his business while maintaining quality.

Now, Kindell and MOTO are taking that mindset a step further, developing an end-to-end pizza robot to help the fast-growing chain keep up with demand and reach more customers than ever before.

You can watch our full conversation below.

Moto's Lee Kindell on Using AI & Robotics to Make Pizza

How Working the Land (and with Steve Jobs and Michael Dell) Led Tim Bucher to Build a Farming Automation Company

While many tech entrepreneurs dream of retiring as a gentleman farmer, Tim Bucher’s journey took the opposite trajectory. It was only after he bought and started working on his own farm at age 16 that a young Bucher discovered his love for software programming in college. That realization embarked him on a career that would eventually see him working alongside Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and other Silicon Valley legends.

Yet, despite all his success in tech, Bucher never left the farm behind. In fact, for most of his life, he has straddled the high-tech world of innovation in Silicon Valley and the vineyards of California’s wine country. Now, as the founder and CEO of Agtonomy, Bucher is merging his two lifelong passions—technology and agriculture—to address one of the farming industry’s biggest challenges: labor shortages and operational inefficiencies.

On a recent episode of The Spoon Podcast, Bucher reflected on his early efforts to use innovation to tackle real-world farming challenges. His farm, Trattori Farms, produces grapes and olives—high-value crops that require precise, labor-intensive care. Over the years, he automated irrigation and winemaking processes, but one critical challenge remained: mechanized labor in the fields.

“The gap between rising costs and revenue was closing,” Bucher explained. “I kept automating everything I could, but I couldn’t automate the skilled labor that was needed out in the vineyards and orchards.”

It wasn’t until Bucher watched a documentary about NASA’s Mars rover that he began thinking about how automation could be applied to farming in a way that made sense for both longtime farmers like himself and the manufacturers of the equipment they trust.

“If we can have self-driving vehicles on Mars, why can’t we have them in our orchards and vineyards?” Bucher said. “There’s no traffic on Mars—just like in agriculture.”

This realization led him to found Agtonomy, a company that transforms traditional tractors into autonomous farming machines. But rather than disrupt the farm equipment industry, Agtonomy’s approach is to partner with manufacturers—helping them integrate drive-by-wire and AI technology into their existing models.

“Farmers trust their brands,” Bucher said. “They need the dealer networks, the parts, the service. Buying farm equipment from a startup isn’t realistic. That’s why Agtonomy is helping manufacturers digitally transform, rather than disrupt.”

As AI continues to evolve, Bucher envisions a future where farmers manage their fields remotely—relying on AI agents to analyze data, recommend actions, and deploy autonomous tractors at optimal times.

“Imagine sitting in a command center where AI tells you, ‘Given the soil, weather, and crop conditions, you should send your autonomous tractors out at 9:12 AM on Wednesday,’” he said. “And you just hit ‘Go.’”

While Bucher sees the potential of automated farming, he doesn’t believe technology will replace human farmers—instead, he sees it as a tool to make them more efficient.

“People fear AI taking jobs, but in farming, we don’t have enough labor. This technology doesn’t replace people—it enables them to do more with less.”

For Bucher, Agtonomy was the logical next step, given his lifelong love for both technology and farming. But beyond personal passion, he believes automation is necessary for the survival of modern agriculture.

“Agriculture has to evolve,” he said. “If we don’t automate, we won’t survive.”

You can listen to the full podcast below, or find it on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Is LG’s Majority Stake in Bear Robotics a Sign That Food Robotics Is About to Have Its Moment?

Late last week, LG Electronics announced it had acquired a majority stake in Bear Robotics, increasing its ownership of the San Francisco-based startup from 21% to 51%. According to South Korean newspaper The Dong-A Ilbo, LG initially acquired its 21% stake in early 2024 for $60 million. The company values its latest stake at $180 million, giving Bear Robotics an overall valuation of $600 million.

While a 60%-of-a-billion-dollar valuation might not compare to the staggering figures often associated with AI startups—though recent events, such as China’s DeepThink’s troubles, may prompt reevaluations—it’s a really good valuation for a food tech company, especially in the challenging food robotics sector.

Where Are All The Unicorns?

Anyone who’s been following The Spoon (we were the first publication to write about Bear Robotics in early 2018) knows food robotics startups have had a tough go of it the last few years. High-profile flameouts like Zume have dominated headlines, while quieter exits, such as Mezli and Vebu, have underscored how challenging this is.

Vebu, formerly Wavemaker Labs, played a pivotal role in launching Miso Robotics, creator of the Flippy burger bot, along with other food robotics concepts like Piestro and Bobacino. However, by the time Serve Robotics acquired Vebu Labs last fall, its only notable product in the portfolio was the Autocado, an avocado-coring robot adopted by Chipotle.

Bear Robotics, however, has achieved steady traction in the restaurant and food service industry. This success, combined with LG’s strategic plans to develop a service robot platform for commercial and home applications, has driven its higher valuation. As The Dong-A Ilbo reported, LG plans to create an integrated solution platform that “encompasses commercial, industrial, and home robots” using Bear Robotics’ software to manage various robot products through a unified system.

Service Robots Over Food-Making Robots

What Bear doesn’t provide LG with is an actual food-making robot; instead, it offers a fairly open platform for service robotics in restaurants and other hospitality spaces. At this point, it’s still unclear whether there will be the same level of interest in food-making robots. Some players, like Picnic and Miso, continue to make progress, but they face significant competition for what is undoubtedly a limited number of big quick-service and fast-casual chains that have yet to acquire their own solutions.

Could Serve and Starship be next?

As major tech companies and consumer brands increasingly view robotics as critical to their future strategies—in what Nvidia’s CEO has called “physical AI”—it’s likely that we’ll see more acquisitions in the service and delivery robotics space. Companies with limited proprietary IP (and my sense is LG didn’t have much here) may be particularly desperate to snap up firms similar to Bear that have been around enough to create a foundation of discernable IP and a varied set of products and build a customer base.

Potential acquisition candidates include Serve Robotics, known for its sidewalk delivery robots, and Starship Technologies, a leader in autonomous delivery systems. Both companies have gained traction but operate in an environment where consolidation is becoming inevitable.

Anova Serves Up a Generous Helping of AI With Launch of Anova Precision Oven 2.0

Last week, Anova announced the second generation of its Precision Oven, just over four years after it began to ship the first generation Precision Oven. The Anova Precision Oven 2.0 is packed with a number of new features, including an in-oven camera and Anova Intelligence, a suite of new AI features designed to power new ways for users to assist in the cooking process.

In fact, the company listed a bunch of features currently offered by their AI-powered cooking and a number of features that they are working on. The features the Anova Precision Oven 2.0 currently has include:

  • Ingredient Recognition: The AI system automatically identifies what’s inside the oven with the internal camera.
  • Suggested Cooking Methods: The oven’s AI will suggest cooking methods tailored to the ingredients, ranging from basic roasting to more complex sous vide style.
  • Packaged Food Conversion: The oven will scan the packaging, and the AI will choose the right settings.
  • Recipe Conversion: The company says the Anova Precision Oven 2.0’s AI can convert nearly any recipe to make it work with its settings, with the caveat that this feature will improve over time as it gains more data.

According to Anova, upcoming features for Anova Intelligence include:

  • Assistant Mode: Anova’s AI-powered co-pilot will simplify complex cooking techniques and offer personalized cooking guidance.
  • Complex Meal Creation: When preparing multi-component dishes, the oven will suggest optimal settings for each ingredient, “streamlining” the cooking process for recipes that typically require juggling multiple cooking techniques.
  • Cook Recall: The oven will recognize repeat recipes for dishes you prepare frequently and return to your last-used settings.
  • Doneness Detection: Powered by the internal camera, the oven monitors the cook’s desired crispness level and alerts them when it reaches the preferred doneness level.
  • Auto Shutdown: The oven will detect when a cook cycle has finished and whether food has been removed, then notify you before automatically shutting off.
  • “Clean Me” Reminders: Equipped with an internal camera that monitors for dirt buildup, the oven will remind you when it’s time for a cleaning.

With the addition of the camera and new AI features, it looks like Anova hopes to fill the void left after Weber sunsetted the June oven about a year ago. While some features (like auto-shutdown) don’t seem all that interesting, I am intrigued by features like the coming co-pilot mode.

In addition to the new AI features, the second-gen oven includes even tighter temperature management (powered by three internal temperature sensors and a more powerful on-board processor) and better steam management. The new oven also includes a new app and an additional recipe subscription service for $1.99 a month or $9.99 annually.

All of these new features come with a hefty price tag increase at $1199, double that of the launch price of the first-gen oven. While some may pass on the 2.0 due to the price increase, given the void left by June and the cult following Anova has, I expect the new Anova oven to sell fairly well when it ships.

Robot Delivery Startup Starship Teams Up With European Food Delivery Company Bolt

Sidewalk robotic delivery Starship Technologies announced this week they are teaming up with Bolt, a European multiplatform delivery company, to launch a new food delivery service using Starship’s autonomous robots in Tallinn, Estonia.

The launch, centered in Tallinn, has the potential to reach up to 180,000 residents according to Bolt. Starship’s robots will operate from three Bolt Market locations—Tulika, Pallasti, and Mustika—via the Bolt Food app. During the launch period, customers will get to use the service for free (the companies did not disclose how much the service will cost post-launch).

Starship robots can carry up to three bags of groceries within a 3-kilometer radius. Bolt customers can opt for “robot delivery” through the app, meet the robot outside their location, and unlock it using the app to retrieve their items.

“This collaboration is not just about convenience and choice,” said Ahti Heinla, who cofounded Starship Technologies with fellow Skype cofounder Janus Friis. “Integrating our robots into Bolt’s service offers a scalable, sustainable delivery solution that reduces traffic and emissions. This is an exciting step forward toward greener cities across Europe.”

Starship, which was the first company to launch the first sidewalk delivery robot a decade ago, has completed over 7 million deliveries globally and traveled more than 14 million kilometers in 100 locations worldwide, according to the announcement. Operating at L4 autonomy since 2018, the company says its robots perform 150,000 crossings daily.

The two companies plan to expand beyond Tallin, but have yet to give a timetable for expansion. The news comes a week after Starship became the first sidewalk delivery platform approved for delivery in Minneapolis, delivering from Panda Express, Starbucks and Erbert & Gerbert’s.

When it Comes to Using AI To Shape New Culinary Creations, Ali Bouzari Thinks Food is Mostly ‘All Hands’

In the most recent episode of the Spoon Podcast, I caught up with food scientist Ali Bouzari to discuss his work and get his thoughts on new technologies that are helping to shape the future of food.

I first met Bouzari when he spoke at the Culinary Institute of America a few years ago about how robotics could impact food service and other sectors. At the time, he talked about Creator—a burger restaurant powered by robots—and suggested that food robots could sometimes do things that most food service employees could not replicate. He specifically referred to how Creator’s burger bot could create more intricate structures in the burger patty than possible to enhance mouthfeel.

When I asked him about this on the podcast, he suggested that while yes, there are things technology can do, he was worried about the recent obsession with AI and using it to craft recipes and new culinary creations. He drew a parallel between AI’s notorious difficulty in rendering realistic-looking human hands in artwork and the challenge of using AI in food production.

“You know that recurring motif where somebody will put a seemingly impressive piece of AI-generated imagery up and be like, ‘My God, look at Darth Vader doing this thing in Saturday Night Fever or something.’ And everybody always says, ‘Look at the hands, look at the fingers.’ And there’s always something wrong with the hands. There’s something that is difficult for AI to crack. What I would say it is most of food is hands. Food is basically all hands.”

Bouzari also shared how multiple clients had approached him after playing with generative AI tools to experiment with developing food products. “We have clients being like, ‘Hey, ChatGPT said we should put arrowroot flour in this cookie.’ I think that somebody is feeding all of the AI brains a lot of great information about arrowroot. Because three different people on three different projects have said that AI said, ‘Have you tried arrowroot?’ which is, in a lot of instances, kind of a useless ingredient.

But thinking about things like AI have caught his attention, Bouzari told me the biggest challenge that has his attention nowadays is the impact of climate change and how food brands are facing a reality that their products may not have a future if they continue to do things – and create food products – in the same way as they have in the past.

One example he gave is the global cacao shortage. “Chocolate is in trouble,” Bouzari said. He pointed to how disruptions in cacao production are driving up costs and threatening the availability of what is a beloved staple. This isn’t some distant, theoretical issue Bouzari told me. “It’s already happening.”

And it’s not just chocolate.

“Coffee’s next,” said Bouzari. “Coffee might do a thing where, like grapes, it just creeps higher and higher latitudes as things change.”

And because of this urgency food brands are now faced with that Bouzari gets a little annoyed with how food makers are sometimes distracted with shiny new toys while missing the big picture.

“My thinking with food is it’s a little bit extra irksome, the conversation around AI sometimes, where people say, ‘I’ve spent six months trying to get this generative AI to make me a new pasta recipe,’ when I don’t think we need that. And the water and energy cost of all of that computation is directly contributing to, I think, the actual biggest existential problem we have, which is climate change.”

We also talk about Bouzari’s experience on the Netflix Show Snack vs. Chef, his thoughts on alternative proteins and what gets him excited about the future.

You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or by clicking play below.

Serve Robotics Partners With Drone Delivery Specialist Wing To Pair Sidewalk With Aerial Delivery

Serve Robotics Inc. and Wing Aviation announced a pilot program this week that will combine their delivery methods to extend the reach of restaurant deliveries across densely populated urban areas. According to the announcement, Serve’s robots will collect orders from restaurant curbsides and transport them to Wing’s AutoLoader hubs, where Wing’s drones will carry the packages to customers up to six miles away.

Serve Robotics spun out of Uber in 2021 and has since worked with the likes of Uber Eats and 7-Eleven. According to the company, its robots have completed tens of thousands of deliveries in urban markets. For its part, Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says it has racked up 400,000 commercial deliveries across three continents, working with food delivery partners like DoorDash.

This announcement is interesting because it represents the first integration of sidewalk and aerial delivery. I’ll be watching if this thing ever moves out of pilot since, as drone delivery has moved significantly slower in terms of rollout than many providers had hoped, and combining it with sidewalk delivery adds another potential complication that could trip up cautious delivery operators and restaurants.

However, if Serve can nail handoffs at Drone pick-up areas as suggested in the video (the choppy editing looks a bit suspect to me), I can see this becoming a real peanut butter and jelly combo for quick deployment of food.

Watch as a Serve Sidewalk Robot Hands Off Food Delivery to a Wing Drone

I’ve Seen The Future of Food Logging Apps, And It’s GPT Food Cam

If you’ve ever tried to log your food intake with an app, you probably have realized the following:

  1. Manual food logging with an app is a pain.
  2. Food logging apps are often inaccurate because they require users to estimate portion size, ingredients, etc.
  3. Food logging apps have cumbersome onboarding processes, ask for a lot of personal info, and usually try to upsell users into premium subscriptions.

For these reasons, I have not used a food-logging app for more than a few weeks, but that may soon change with GPT Food Cam. What is GPT Food Cam? In a few words, it’s a free food-logging app that lets you snap each meal or snack with your smartphone camera and uses AI to estimate calories. The app, which can be downloaded from the iOS App Store, doesn’t ask you to take a survey or require a subscription, and, from what I can tell within a day of use, it is really pretty darn good.

That’s my description, but what does Raj Singh, the longtime entrepreneur who is the visionary behind the app, have to say about it? According to Singh, who posted recently about the app on LinkedIn, GPT Food Cam is different from other food logging apps in three primary ways:

Instant Camera Access: The app opens straight to the camera, allowing users to quickly capture their meals without navigating menus. “I wanted it to be fast and low friction,” Singh said. “In social settings, it’s less intrusive to quickly snap a photo.”

Calorie Ranges Instead of Exact Figures: Singh said that because AI has its own limitations and portion sizes vary, the app provides a calorie range. “By presenting a range, it’s mostly right,” Singh said. “The goal is to build the habit of food logging and become a more mindful eater.”

Free and Unobtrusive: Unlike many apps that require subscriptions or bombard users with ads, GPT Food Cam is entirely free and supported by occasional, non-intrusive advertisements. “Right now, ads are making four times the revenue of the AI costs,” Singh said in a phone interview with The Spoon. “This allows us to keep the app free and potentially expand its features and availability to more countries.”

After working with a food coach who encouraged him to send photos of his meals for feedback, Singh sought a convenient digital solution to continue the practice. However, he found existing apps lacking—either too complex, costly, or both.

“They were designed for the 5% who need precision, but I wanted something simple, free, and for the other 95%,” Singh said.

According to Singh, GPT Food Cam leverages Gemini Flash, a fast and cost-effective AI model, to analyze images and estimate calorie content. Users simply snap a photo of their meal, and the app processes the image to provide an approximate calorie range.

“A lot of this is prompt engineering,” Singh explained. “We use ‘chain-of-thought’ prompting, where we break down the AI’s task into specific steps. The prompt instructs the AI to look at what’s in the picture, consider each ingredient independently, estimate serving sizes based on context—like whether it’s in a bowl or on a plate—and then estimate the calories of each item before adding them up.”

Singh emphasized that while AI isn’t perfect—with about 95% accuracy—it’s sufficient for promoting mindful eating. “AI has consistently been 95% accurate,” he said. “It’s great for recommendations and suggestions, but when it comes to critical workflows, it might get things wrong 5% of the time. For food logging, where precision isn’t as critical, this level of accuracy is acceptable.”

The creation of GPT Food Cam came after a serendipitous conversation with a friend. Singh’s friend, Zvika Ashkenazi, mentioned that his son, Ben Ashkenazi, was seeking an unpaid summer internship and wondered if Singh could mentor him. Singh soon began working with Ben, and six weeks later, GPT FoodCam was born.

“Ben is graduating from ASU in Computer Science in December,” Singh said. “He taught himself React, iOS development, and more this summer with minimal help from my network. He built this end-to-end.”

While GPT Food Cam emerged just in the last couple of months after Singh’s epiphany and Ben Ashkenazi’s coding work, Singh has been toying with the idea of a low-friction app to track food intake for a decade. In 2009, he tried to develop a similar application but soon realized the technology wasn’t mature enough.

“In 2009, I tried to create this exact app,” said Singh, who is currently the head of product for Mozilla’s Solo after the browser company acquired his startup Pulse in 2022. “It wasn’t good enough, and so we pivoted into a recipe company, which became Allthecooks.” Allthecooks would go on to become the number one recipe community on Android in 2010, with 30 million users, and would later be acquired by Cookpad.

Unlike then, “the tech is now here, making GPT Food Cam a reality,” Singh said. “Advancements in AI and image recognition have finally caught up with the vision I had over a decade ago.”

With the technology to make friction-free food logging a reality, Singh told me he wants to disrupt the food logging industry by offering a free, low-friction app, but he thinks it can do so with little involvement from him going forward.

“I build some things for fun. At the onset of a new project, I’m like, ‘This is not gonna make money, but the world needs it,’ or, ‘This is gonna be my next business, and I’m leaving where I’m at.'”

Singh made it clear he is happy at Mozilla and, in fact, used the product he conceived of building for Mozilla (Solo, an AI website builder) to create the website for GPT Food Cam. From here, he will let Ashkenazi run with the product, even if he periodically suggests some ideas to make it successful.

“I think it can be very, very disruptive. People are paying $10 a month for apps they don’t need to. This app can encourage better habits without the cost and complexity.”

Singh said he is also considering expanding the app’s capabilities and reach. With the ad revenue already exceeding the AI costs by a four-to-one margin, there’s potential to increase daily usage limits (currently, users are limited to six snaps a day) and make the app available in more countries.

Selfishly, I hope he and Ashkenazi succeed because, from what I’ve seen so far, I think the app is, in fact, potentially disruptive, and I hope to keep on using it. Who knows, maybe Ashkenazi (with a little help from Singh) can put their app on a similar journey we saw with Marco Arment’s Overcast app, which originally was a passion project that emerged from Arment’s annoyance with the current state of podcast apps to become the most user-friendly podcast app (and most popular, outside of Apple’s podcast app) in the world.

A Look at the Vayu One Delivery Robot, Which Navigates Bike Lanes to Deliver Your Food

Ever since the founders of Skype launched Starship over eight years ago, we’ve seen an explosion of small-footprint delivery robots that navigate sidewalks to deliver their payloads to consumers.

While these small robots sidestep many of the challenges and regulatory oversight needed for on-road travel, they are, in general, pretty small and usually only travel short distances.

However, a new company called Vayu, founded by former Apple and Lyft execs, hopes to make the robot delivery market (and our groceries) arrive just a little faster by jumping off the curb and into the bike delivery lane with its new robot. The Vayu One, which was formerly introduced today, is a larger form-factor robot which can carry up to 100 pounds of payload and move at 20 miles per hour.

You can see the Vayu One in action in the video provided by the company below:

A Look at Vayu's Bike Lane Delivery Robot

According to the company, the robot uses a transformer-based model (likely a vision language model) combined with a “passive sensor” that enables the robot to navigate without lidar (the laser-light-based navigation technology used by many autonomous automobiles). The company says the robot can navigate roads, and in-store environments, and also drop off the payloads at its delivery destinations unassisted (you can see it do just that in the video).

The video shows a worker using voice commands to control the robot and load packages as it navigates around the store. Unlike the smaller sidewalk robots like those of Serve and Starship, the Vayu One is somewhat sizable, about the length of an e-bike and approximately three feet wide. This makes me wonder how it will navigate within the narrow corridors of some small-format stores.

Interestingly, the company says it has already obtained regulatory approval to operate on some public roads in certain cities. I’m interested to see which cities have greenlit the company, as my guess is that putting a robot onto a public street – even if it’s a bike lane – would require a significant amount of regulatory hoop-hopping compared to sidewalk delivery.

According to the company, they have a deal with a “large e-commerce player” to deploy 2,500 robots to enable ultra-fast delivery. If the deal holds up, Vayu would quickly eclipse the fleet numbers of Serve (which has about 100 robots in the field) and other players in the autonomous bot delivery space.

Vayu is backed by blue-chip VC Khosla Ventures, which recently led a $12.7 million funding round.

Chef Robotics Comes Out of Stealth to Show Off Robot and Reveal Early Customers

This week, Chef Robotics, the San Francisco-based food robotics startup founded by Rajat Bhageria, stepped out of stealth mode and into the spotlight by unveiling its robot and disclosing some of its high-profile partnerships.

In an interview with The Spoon, Bhageria, an investor and technology founder, showcased Chef, a food robot that assembles cooked and ready-to-eat food in high-volume environments. This focus, says Bhageria, is much different from the bulk of robots in the market, most of which focus primarily on prep and cooking in restaurants and food service.

“Restaurants have low volume, making automation difficult because jobs are generalized,” Bhageria explained. “In high-volume operations, jobs become specialized, making automation feasible. We focused on getting robots into the field quickly to gather real-world training data, improving our food manipulation AI.”

Bhageria, a master’s graduate of Penn’s Robotics and Machine Learning Lab, started his first company in high school, a social network for young writers. During college and grad school, he founded Third Eye, a company using computer vision to assist the visually impaired. This project opened his eyes to the immense potential of AI and computer vision. “Computer vision and AI are immensely powerful. Even back in 2014, I saw AI’s potential impact on our lives.”

Along the way, Bhageria started an early-stage venture capital company called Prototype Capital with an investment thesis that helped shape his own company: applying new innovations to old industries. The organizing principle here was that big ideas and proprietary data sets were not just confined to Silicon Valley but seeded in older communities built around these mature industries that would benefit most from technology transformation.

While he and his Prototype partners invested in businesses nestled in rust-belt epicenters and other mature communities, he continued to work on – and crystalize – his idea for Chef. As he interviewed executives from these companies and asked about their pain points, he realized that food preparation is one of the most labor-constrained sectors in the US. As he dug deeper, it dawned on him that food assembly and plating were more labor-intensive than prepping and cooking (which often only needed a single employee for each).

“Prepping and cooking can be done in bulk, but assembly scales linearly with output,” Bhageria said. “Automating assembly can save labor and increase volume and revenue.”

Bhageria believes his approach to food assembly first mirrors that of Tesla, which tackled the high-end, high-performance sector with the Roadster before moving on to mass-market production models.

“Going to restaurants is like trying to build the Model 3 from the get-go,” said Bhageria. “If Elon and Tesla tried to build the Model 3 from the start, it probably wouldn’t have worked.”

However, Bhageria believes that the lowest-volume, most distributed form of cooking robot – a home robot – isn’t in the cards, at least for his company.

“I am kind of of the opinion that at-home robots for food will not be a thing. People don’t want to maintain a robot in their house, buy it, refill it, or take care of it. They prefer having meals made in ghost kitchens by robots and delivered to their homes.”

Bhageria believes in the future, consumers will be touched by food robots, but only in a world where robot-assembled food in centralized kitchens will mean more variety and lower cost food for everyone.

“Cooking will go to people who still cook because they love it,” Bhageria predicted. “But more and more of the world will get their food made in ghost kitchens by robots, delivered by robots.”

In addition to revealing his robot and his company’s approach to food automation to the world, Bhageria also disclosed some of his company’s early clients. He said his customers include Amy’s Kitchen, a well-known frozen prepared meal company, and Sunbasket, a direct-to-consumer meal provider with a substantial contract manufacturing arm. Another company Chef Bombay, a Canadian food company, has integrated Chef Robotics’ into their operations.

Bhageria said his customers span a number of industries, primarily those that need high-volume assembly of ready-to-eat meals. These industries include hospitals, airlines, delivery services, grocery stores, and frozen prepared meals.

“These environments are extremely manual, with people scooping ingredients for long hours in cold rooms. Our robots help automate this process, addressing labor shortages and increasing production volume.”

You can see my full interview with Bhageria below.

Chef Robotics Founder Rajat Bhageria Unveils his Company's Robot and Talks About The Future