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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Nuro Gets Regulatory Approval for Self-Driving Delivery in California

Autonomous food delivery revved a few miles forward today. Nuro, a company that makes self-driving vehicles for delivery, announced it is receiving the first-ever Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Permit from the California DMV. According to an email sent to The Spoon, this gives Nuro permission to launch a commercial autonomous vehicle service in California (which would be the first in the state). 

In layman’s terms, that means Nuro can now delivery groceries, household items, and other goods to customers’ doorsteps via its own self-driving vehicles. 

These pod-like vessels are roughly half the size of a regular car and completely autonomous. There isn’t even room for a human drive to sit in the vehicle, which travels at a max of 25 miles per hour. 

The news follows Nuro’s $500 million fundraise from earlier this month, as well as the testing permit Nuro received in April to operate on public roads in California.

Regulatory approval, or lack thereof, is one of the major factors inhibiting widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles for food and grocery delivery. State and local governments have to ensure public safety on roads, sidewalks, bridges, and other throughways before they can allow fleets of unmanned vehicles to be unleashed in cities and towns. That explains why some companies, including Starship and Kiwi, started on college campuses.

But Starship and Kiwi rover bots that are considerably smaller than Nuro’s R2 vehicle, which wouldn’t in all likelihood easily drive through the camps quad. The Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Permit means Nuro won’t have to resort to such locations in order to make its delivery services available to U.S. residents. 

Nuro said in today’s email that it will start delivery service with existing partners in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties in the new year. Service will begin with the company’s autonomous Prius vehicles and eventually transition to the company’s “full fleet” of both Priuses and R2s. 

Also this week, Nuro acquired autonomous trucking company Ike. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

My 2020 Prediction Scorecard: Equity Crowdfunding (✅) and Pop-Up Retail (❌)

Before unceremoniously kicking 2020 to the curb, as an industry watcher, I have to make the yearly mental trek backwards to revisit the predictions I made for this year.

This, wretched, wretched year.

Going into 2020, my big two bets were on equity crowdfunding and semi-permanent pop-up retail experiences. Seeing how it all panned out, I’d say I batted .500 this year. Equity crowdfunding caught on (especially with food robots), but those pop-ups? Not so much-ups.

Equity crowdfunding, or eschewing institutional venture capital money in favor of opening investment up to just about anyone, did seem to catch on this year. Small Robot Company, Winc, Miso Robotics, Mellow, Piestro, Kiwibot, Renewal Mill, Bobacino and Blendid all launched or announced equity crowdfunding campaigns this year.

Why did these companies turn to the crowd? Part of the reason is that skipping VC money means there’s less pressure to scale your business so dramatically. But there are other reasons as well as some Founders told us.

Sam Watson Jones, Co-founder, Small Robot Company told me earlier this year that “VCs are a bit different in the UK. There are very few early stage VCs to fund stuff that requires more development. We knew we had a load of farmers who were excited about what we could develop.” Crowdfunding, Watson said “allowed us to get angels and people who would put ten quid in. It’s been a good forum for us to capitalize on the branding and PR.”

Then just this month, Blendid Founder and CEO, Vipin Jain explained to us why his company decided to equity crowdfund, saying, “Since Blendid has recently expanded into retail establishments with national partners – giving us a much broader audience – it made sense to do crowdfunding.  Crowdfunding not only allows you to raise money, but also drives consumer brand awareness and advocacy, by enabling fans of Blendid to individually invest as well as enjoy our delicious blends.”

So did the campaigns work? That’s kind of hard tell without speaking directly with each company, but here’s what we know:

  • Small Robot Company raised £2,003,880 ($2,596,000 USD), surpassing its goal of £700,000 target
  • Winc raised $5.3 million
  • Miso Robotics raised $16.7 million, or a little more than half of the $30 million it sought
  • Mellow‘s equity crowdfunding was a bust and the company failed to reach its funding goal
  • Piestro‘s first go-round with equity crowdfunding went so well it launched a second campaign
  • Kiwibot has raised $576,034 of the $1 million it wanted
  • Renewal Mill raised $116,777 of its $1 million goal

Bobacino’s campaign won’t launch until next year, and it’s still early in Blendid’s campaign, so we’ll have to check back in on both of those.

I’m curious to see if the food robot world continues to go the equity crowdfunding route in 2021. While it does allow startups to skip the VC death march, so far, it doesn’t seem like a way to raise the large amounts of money a robot company needs to scale. But equity crowdfunding is still a pretty nascent concept. Like so manythings, if someone makes money on it, potential investors will flock to it.

What people weren’t being driven to in 2020 was semi-permanent retail environments. At the start of the year, I thought brands would take to the mini cashierless retail environments created by AiFi with its NanoStore and Zippin with its pre-fab Cubes.

These small, plug-and-play retail environments are easy to set up inside office buildings (or just about anywhere, really). They could, for instance, allow a grocer like Safeway to build a small, unattended Safeway-branded store in a lobby, or a hospital or train station. This is a lot cheaper than building out or retrofitting an existing space. And since there’s no cashier, they can be more economical to run.

But the pandemic forced people to avoid offices and other high-traffic areas, and subsequently pushed them into record amounts of online grocery shopping from home. As such, retailers needed to focus less on creating new retail spaces and more on their own logistics and fulfillment to accommodate all those new e-commerce orders.

I still think cashierless checkout technology will pave the way for a boom in pop-up stores over the next couple of years (AiFi aims to build 330 such stores by the end of 2021). Retailers will want to create more contactless ways of shopping that are fast and get people in and out of stores quickly, and setting up a small, cashierless stores is one way to do that.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll put pop-ups on my prediction list for 2021….

Moley’s Robotic Kitchen Goes on Sale

Moley’s robotic kitchen first burst onto the scene in 2015, wowing audiences at CES Asia with its science fiction-levels of cooking automation. Now after more than five years of development, the Moley is finally going on sale. But the kitchen of tomorrow is not going to be cheap.

It’s probably best to set the stage first. Getting a Moley requires a lot more work than just bolting a robotic arm above your existing stove. It’s an entirely integrated system of appliances, cupboards, a touchscreen, storage containers, pots, pans, utensils, a protective screen and yes, two articulating arms with robotic hands. The Moley basically takes up one entire wall of a kitchen.

Once it’s installed, or more accurately, built, into your kitchen, there’s a little bit of set up for a person to do. Ingredients needs to go into special containers and identified in the system so the robot knows where to retrieve them. Utensils and pots are placed in special storage areas that slide out of view when not in use. But once all that’s done, the digital smarts and robot take over.

Using the built-in touchscreen, the user selects from one of 5,000 (and growing) recipes. A clear, protective screen drops down and the two robotic arms slide out from their storage on a rail up above to start grabbing the pots, pans and utensils it needs. The robot can fill a pot with water in the sink, turn on the induction burner and then, using sensors and cameras, retrieve all the ingredients it needs to make the dish. Moley will even let you know when you’re running low on a particular ingredient.

The robotic arm’s movements even have some pedigree. Tim Anderson, a former BBC Master Chef winner, “trained” the robot’s movements by recording his techniques in 3D, which were then translated into specific algorithms for the machine. It’s not hard to imagine Moley enlisting other chefs down the road and offering different downloads so you could have “Nigella Lawson,” or “Marcus Samuelsson” cooking your meals.

Listen. It’s a super complex piece of high-technology and perhaps the best way to grok it is to see it in action in this in-depth launch video that Moley put out this week:

Moley Robotics First Product Launch 2020

The Moley kitchen is also a hybrid of sorts. If you prefer to do the cooking, you can keep the robot in its closet and do all the work yourself. Though, at these prices, I imagine you’d want to put that robot to work.

Moley is targeting both residential and commercial kitchens with its launch. Make that, very expensive residential kitchens. A base Moley kitchen without the robotic arms will cost you £128,000 (~ $173,000 USD) and a unit with the robotic arms will cost £248,000 (~ $335,000 USD).

Moley CEO and Founder, Mark Oleynik, told The Spoon in a phone interview this week that the first customer will be receiving their Moley robotic kitchen next year. (No further details were offered).

Oleynik also put the high price of the Moley into some perspective by likening it to a dishwasher. When those were first introduced, they were expensive and most people didn’t think they were necessary. Now dishwashers are affordable, mainstream and play a key role in our kitchen lives.

Oleynik also envisions a future where his robotic kitchen can help the elderly age in place. With just a few taps on a screen, people of any age can have a homecooked, fresh meal prepared on the spot. It’s the same vision Sony has for its take on the future of kitchen robotics.

Samsung is also working on an articulating arm-based kitchen robot, and Oleynik welcomes the competition with a philosophy that a rising tide lifts all robotic kitchen boats.

The Moley is available for purchase now, and if any Spoon reader does get one, may we recommend pairing it with the WineCab Wine Wall robotic sommelier for the ultimate in futuristic dining.

Cheetah Mobile’s FANBOT is a Vending Machine on Wheels

This week, Chinese tech company Cheetah Mobile announced the international availability of its FANBOT mobile vending machine robot.

The FANBOT is a squat, self-driving robot that can carry up to 66 different items including snacks, drinks and other goods in its cargo bay. From the FANBOT promotional materials, it looks like there’s a touchscreen for ordering and shoppers can use a mobile phone to pay.

FANBOT drives itself around high-traffic areas such as malls, stores, gyms, hotel lobbies and airports, and will identify and approach potential customers. So, exactly how does FANBOT know whom to approach? According to the press release:

Through its proprietary multi-sensor fusion environment perception system, the FANBOT uses biometric technology, not facial recognition, to identify potential customers by detecting people’s gender, age range and emotions within a 5-meter radius. Once identified, the FANBOT actively approaches the customer to promote products, engage in voice interactions and complete cash-less transactions.

Huh. Interesting. Exactly how FANBOT picks customers and what biometric data it is using wasn’t immediately explained. We reached out to Cheetah Mobile to find out more details. UPDATE: Cheetah Mobile emailed us the following:

Body temperature is one of the key biometric features the robot is looking for. People of different genders and age groups have different body temperatures; and people that are happy and relaxed also have different body temperatures than those who are down and anxious. Voice is another one. The FANBOT can detect the vocal features of different demographics: men, women, seniors, teenagers, children, etc.

The FANBOT’s multi-sensor fusion environment perception system can detect people’s body temperature, voice and other biometric features within a 5-meter radius, and use algorithms to determine whom to approach.

For example, in a high-traffic area, if one man and a family of three are walking around the robot, it will automatically detect the family of three as the more likely potential customers and approach them instead of the man. Or, if the FANBOT carries beauty products, it’s more likely to approach female customers than male.

FANBOT is already in use in China, and the company says that the sales volume is four times that of a stationary vending machine, selling one beverage roughly every 110 seconds.

We seem to be on the cusp of a mobility trend in food vending. Earlier this week, Yo-Kai Express revealed that it is working on a mobile vending machine that will cruise around serving up hot bowls of ramen. And earlier this month, BIB Technologies unveiled the Automato, which is an electric mobile Automat carrying cubbies full of food.

For indoor settings, it doesn’t make sense to put a big, hulking vending machine like Yo-Kai’s on wheels. That would get pretty obtrusive pretty quick. But something the size of FANBOT actually does make a lot of sense. Making small vending more mobile and bringing snacks to people idling in hotel lobbies and such could really catch on.

Exclusive: Yo-Kai Express to Launch Autonomous Mobile Vending Machine and Countertop Cooking Device

Yo-Kai Express, which started out as a robotic ramen vending machine, is expanding its offerings with the addition of a mobile, self-driving version of its vending machine as well as a countertop cooking device in 2021. Yo-Kai Founder and CEO, Andy Lin, announced the new products during my fireside chat with him at the Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan last night.

Both moves are part of a larger push by Yo-Kai to transform itself into a broader platform. As Lin explained it, Yo-Kai is assembling the pieces so users can get hot ramen wherever they are, whenever they want.

One of the ways it is doing this is by making its vending machines mobile. Lin said that Yo-Kai has been working on a self-driving version of its vending machine. This autonomous restaurant-on-wheels will eventually be able to drive on certain routes and stop when hailed by a mobile phone and, Lin said, even when a person waves at it while the machine passes by.

That vision is still a ways off, but Lin said the first version of this self-driving ramen machine is already being manufactured and should debut at the end of Q1 2021/beginning of Q2. Yo-Kai is currently in talks with the Universities of California at Berkeley and Irvine to have the machine operate on those campuses. Going the college route makes sense for Yo-Kai, as it helps the company sidestep some of the regulatory hurdles around self-driving vehicles on public city streets. This is the same path that Starship took with its autonomous delivery robots.

The mobile machine is just one of many different, err, vehicles Yo-Kai is adopting to dispense its hot ramen. The company is also working on machines built for small or large offices, as well as your kitchen counter. Last night, Lin also unveiled Yo-Kai’s new Takumi, a new cooking device for the home.

The Takumi ties in with the line of mail-order ramen that Yo-Kai launched earlier this year. Currently, Yo-Kai mails out ramen kits that you have to assemble; they take about 15 minutes to fully prepare. In its next iteration, the ramen will be made, frozen and shipped to you in a single-serve container. Users will put the container into the Takumi, which uses steam to reconstitute and heat the ramen in just a few minutes.

In addition to offering more ways to get ramen, Yo-Kai is also opening up its platform to offer customers ramen from different restaurants. Yo-Kai is currently in talks to co-brand and sell meals from well-known ramen houses in Japan. Yo-Kai will work with these restaurants to recreate thos ramen restaurant recipes in Yo-Kai kitchens. Those meal will then be sold via branded ramen machines, and they will also be sold by mail order to consumers, who can cook it in their Takumi.

We’ve seen this type of co-branding elsewhere with automated vending services. Blendid, which makes a smoothie making robot, recently announced a co-branding deal with Jamba, and Chowbotics partnered with Saladworks on a salad making robot. Co-branding will likely be the main strategy for vending services going forward, as it leverages the brand recognition of a well-known restaurant, rather than trying to build up the robot company’s brand.

As Lin explained to me when I first met him last year, in Japanese folklore, Yo-Kais are ghosts that can appear anywhere at any time. With its forthcoming moves, Yo-Kai Express’ ramen will be doing much the same thing.

Gatik’s Autonomous Middle-Mile Trucks to Go Full Driverless for Walmart

Self-driving delivery vehicles along the middle mile just got a little more autonomous. Walmart announced today that the Gatik self-driving delivery box trucks it uses on one Arkansas delivery route will remove the safety driver from the vehicle in 2021.

Gatik had quietly revealed plans for this driverless delivery last week. As Gatik explained then, one of the reasons it was able to go full driverless is because of the company’s focus on the middle mile. The middle mile is the business-to-business path when moving goods — between a warehouse and a store, for example. Because this route is clearly defined, fixed and repeatable, it decreases the number of variables a self-driving car will encounter. Gatik said this limited autonomous scope made it easier to gain regulatory approval necessary to for true humanless driving.

In addition to driverless deliveries in Arkansas, Walmart is expanding where and how it will use Gatik trucks. From the Walmart blog post:

We’ve tested multi-temperature Autonomous Box Trucks on a small scale in Bentonville and have learned how we might use autonomous vehicles to transfer customer orders from a dark store to a live store. Now, we’re expanding our pilot with Gatik to a second location to test an even longer delivery route and a second use case – delivering items from a Supercenter to a Walmart pickup point, a designated location where customers can conveniently pick up their orders. The Autonomous Box Trucks in Louisiana will initially operate with a safety driver.

The new route will be between New Orleans and Metairie, LA. But more interesting than the geography is the new use cases Walmart is outlining. By delivering to a pickup location, Walmart could provide a way for people who don’t live near a Walmart to shop at one. People in these more remote areas could order online and pick their items up closer to home. As Walmart describes, the use of autonomous trucks could essentially create a constant conveyor belt style loop of of deliveries from supercenters to pickup points throughout the day.

Autonomous delivery has been making some nice, errr, inroads this year. Back in February, Nuro got federal approval for its pod-like autonomous delivery vehicles to operate on public roads, and in April the company got approval to operate on California’s roads. In October the company announced that its vehicles had been running in three states with no drivers, no occupants and no chase cars.

In addition to its middle mile, Walmart is also testing out autonomous grocery delivery with cars from Cruise in Scottsdale Arizona.

Part of what’s spurring all this autonomous action is, of course, the COVID pandemic. Autonomous delivery helps reduce the amount of human-to-human contact when transferring goods, and as noted above, could be a means for operating a continuous supply chain so there are fewer product shortages.

Panasonic Testing Delivery Robots in Japanese Smart Town

Electronics giant Panasonic announced today that it has started testing autonomous delivery robots on public roads in the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town in Japan. Initial tests started in November; the company aims to begin home delivery tests in February of 2021.

Panasonic said the this first phase will include the home delivery of “packages and products using a smartphone app.” While food wasn’t specifically mentioned in the press release, the company pointed out the growth of food delivery and lack of labor to carry out those deliveries. Additionally, Panasonic talked about the growing need for contactless delivery options, thanks to the pandemic.

Panasonic got permission from Fujisawa City authorities to begin its self-driving tests. The autonomous robots will be connected via a public network, and a human operator will monitor the robots from a control center and take over driving should the need arise.

The city of Fujisawa itself sounds interesting. From Panasonic’s press announcement:

Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town is an urban development project located on the former site of Panasonic’s factory in Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture, with the participation of 18 groups including Panasonic and Fujisawa City. As a real smart town where more than 2,000 people live, it is working on sustainable urban development while also aiming to solve issues facing society and the community through the implementation of mechanisms jointly designed by the companies, local governments, and residents involved with the town, and through the creation of new services.

Panasonic’s delivery robot move is part of a broader trend, as we see cities from around the world begin rolling out delivery robots on public streets. In Russia, Yandex robots are making restaurant deliveries in Moscow. The Postmates Serve robot is making deliveries from the Pink Dot market in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. And Woowa Brothers delivery robots have started making food deliveries in Seoul, South Korea.

We’ve seen an increase in robot activity since the pandemic forced restaurants, grocery and delivery services to establish contactless delivery options. Robots can remove at least one form of human-to-human interaction when getting your food. But robots have other advantages as well, such as the ability to work around the clock and potentially bring down the cost of delivery, making it more affordable to more people.

But as Panasonic’s announcement shows, there are still legal and technical hurdles that need to be overcome. Even in the smart town it helped form, Panasonic still needs to get permits and run tests before it can dive right in to dropping by someone’s front door.

Yandex Robots Roaming Russia Delivering Restaurant Meals

Robots from Yandex, a tech giant which is kind of like Russia’s Google, have started making restaurant deliveries in the Russian cities of Moscow and Innopolis, the company announced in a corporate blog post today.

The Yandex.Rover robots are six-wheeled, cooler-sized robots similar to those from Starship and Kiwibot. They work in conjunction with Yandex.Eats, the company’s restaurant and grocery delivery service that has more than 30,000 merchants across 166 cities. Via the YandexEats app, users select their desired restaurant and choose the delivery-robot option to get their food delivered by one of the company’s bots. When the order arrives, recipients unlock the bot with their mobile phone.

Yandex’s blog post didn’t mention how many delivery robots are in its fleet in each city, or how big the service areas are. It did note that its robots are delivering in the White Square district, which is in central Moscow and home to many cafes and restaurants, and that robot delivery is free in Innopolis. Yandex said its robots can also handle inclement weather, which I imagine is an important feature for Russian winters.

The global pandemic has increased interest in robot delivery in part because of its contactless nature. Robots don’t get sick and can theoretically work around the clock. In recent months we’ve seen a number of rover robot deployments in different parts of the world. The City of San Jose partnered with Kiwibot over the summer to enable restaurant delivery. Save Mart in Modesto, California started delivering groceries via Starship’s robots. Pink Dot started making robot deliveries via Postmate’s Serve robot in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. And in South Korea, Woowa Brothers started making robot deliveries to an apartment complex in Seoul.

As part of its announcement, Yandex said that in addition to delivering restaurant meals, its robots would also be making grocery deliveries in the future.

Robot Smoothie Company Blendid Launches Equity Crowdfunding Campaign

Blendid, a company that produces standalone robotic smoothie-making kiosks, is running an equity crowdfunding campaign through MicroVentures with the goal of raising up to $5 million.

Blendid sent word of its crowdfunding efforts via a marketing email today, though it appears that the campaign itself has been live for roughly a month already. As of this writing, Blendid has already raised more than $240,000 in its crowdfunding campaign.

Equity crowdfunding is becoming quite the popular way to raise money for food-related robot companies. In 2020 alone, Miso Robotics, Kiwibot, Piestro, Bobacino and Small Robot Company all launched or announced equity crowdfunding campaigns.

There are pluses and minuses to going the crowdfunding route. By eschewing traditional VC capital, startups lose out on some of the knowledge and connections that come with institutional investors. But at the same time, crowdfunding helps these companies sidestep some of the scaling pressures that comes with VC money.

Previously, Blendid (formerly 6D Bytes) raised $13.5 million from Benhamou Global Ventures, Plug & Play, Hone Capital and Partech Ventures. We sent a note to Blendid to find out more about its decision to go the crowdfunding route and will update when we hear back. UPDATE: Blendid Founder and CEO, Vipin Jain emailed us the following statement:

“Since Blendid has recently expanded into retail establishments with national partners – giving us a much broader audience – it made sense to do crowdfunding.  Crowdfunding not only allows you to raise money, but also drives consumer brand awareness and advocacy, by enabling fans of Blendid to individually invest as well as enjoy our delicious blends.”

As part of its pitch to potential investors of the crowdfunding campaign, Blendid shared some of its financials. Not surprisingly, 2020 was a rough year for the company. Blendid’s first two locations were at colleges, and given the pandemic and the shift to remote learning, those machines have been inactive for most of the year. According to Blendid, the company earned just $546 in Q3 of this year and $64,119 for its 2020 fiscal year.

Having said that, the fourth quarter has been pretty busy for Blendid. The company has opened two new robots at Walmart locations in California. One of those locations is actually a co-branded robot with Jamba as the company moves away from an owner-operated model to more licensed deals. This shift towards licensing should help with consumer adoption by leveraging the brand recognition that comes with a partnership like Jamba (and others).

One other interesting tid bit from Blendid’s disclosures is that the company is already looking beyond making just smoothies. From the “Product Roadmap” portion of the campaign page:

Q3 2021 – Food format #2 leveraging the existing kiosk, which has been designed as a platform that can be modified to support a large variety of food formats.

For those interested, the minimum investment for the crowdfunding campaign is $100. This post isn’t an endorsement of Blendid and any investment carries with it a certain amount of risk.

Google Takes on Food Waste With Food Tech Innovations Built by X

X, the “moonshot factory” of Google parent company Alphabet, announced today that two prototypes developed as part of a project called Project Delta have graduated and are now being transferred to Google for scaling and commercialization.

Project Delta, which has been incubating within X for the past two and a half years, was led by Emily Ma, who announced the transition to Google today in a blog post.

From the post:

Our team’s mission was to create a smarter food system — one that knows where the food is, what state it’s in, and where best to direct it to ensure it doesn’t end up in a landfill and instead goes to the people who need it most. After two and a half years of prototyping and testing a range of technologies to help reduce food waste and food insecurity, I’m pleased to share that some of our prototypes and team are moving to Google so we can scale up our work.

In her post, Ma highlights two prototypes developed as part of Project Delta. The first is an “intelligent food distribution network” nicknamed “dana-bot.” To build dana-bot, the X team took a dataset donated by the Southwest Produce Cooperative, categorized and standardized each entry, and then used it to match food in food banks and pantries based on “real-time needs in the Feeding America network.” Grocery chain Kroger also leveraged dana-bot to manage excess deli products, which allowed it to open up “millions more meals to communities that need it.”

Above: Project Delta’s prototype food identification and categorization system uses machine learning to automatically identify different types of food.

The second prototype utilized computer vision and machine learning to capture images of food thrown out in Alphabet kitchens. After running it in 20 different units across Alphabet cafes over a period of six months, the system was “able to automatically collect two times as much information about the kitchen’s food waste as the manual system.”

And now these two systems are graduating to Google proper, where Ma says her team hopes to “start tackling food waste and food insecurity on a larger scale.” The team plans to roll out its computer vision system to more Alphabet kitchens and utilize Google’s resources to expand the food distribution network and eventually offer it to other organizations.

As more and more venture funding pours into the future of food, it looks like big tech is starting to also wake up to the possibilities of applying their technology innovation to creating a new food system. Google is no exception. This news is just the latest development from Google and its parent company Alphabet that could have larger-scale implications on the broader food system.

Last week Alphabet announced that its DeepMind group had used AI to help solve a grand challenge around protein structure prediction that the scientific community had been working on for half a century. In August, Google Lookout added food label reading to help the visually impaired, and back in 2017 the company unveiled that its Lens visual discovery technology could serve up recipe suggestions based on images of food.

iUNU Raises $7M Series A for Computer Vision Approach to Indoor Growing

IUNU, which builds computer vision and machine learning systems to add more precision to indoor farming, announced today that it has raised a $7 million Series A round of funding led by S2G Ventures and Ceres Partners.

IUNU (pronounced “yoo-noo”) makes Luna, a robotic system of cameras both fixed and mounted on rails that go on the ceilings of commercial greenhouses. Using these cameras, environmental sensors, computer vision and machine learning, iUNU can measure everything about plants being grown down to the growth rate of each individual plant. If Luna detects changes in the health of plants, it can alert growers so they can take action to improve product quality and yields.

The indoor agriculture space is certainly hot right now, and has seen downright frothy amounts of investment. BrightFarms raised a $100M Series E round in October, Plenty raised a $100M Series D round that same month, and Urban Oasis raised $1.2 million just last month. And just today, Gotham Greens raised $87 million for its high-tech greenhouses.

Beyond straight up fundraising, the indoor farming is also in the midst of a growth boom. AppHarvest is building out the world’s largest greenhouse in Kentucky, and YesHealth Group and Nordic Harvest are building “Europe’s largest” vertical farm.

It’s not hard to understand why there is so much going on in indoor ag right now. The population of our planet is expected to hit 11.2 billion by the end of the century, up from 7.7 billion in 2019. All of those people need to be fed, and more importantly, fed in a way that doesn’t exacerbate environmental problems. With its precision technology, and the ability to move food production closer to consumers, indoor farms hold the promise of creating a more equitable food system.

Unlike the other players mentioned above, iUNU is not a full-stack solution. It’s not in the business of growing its own greens. The Luna system can be used to help make existing greenhouses more productive and could presumably be built into these new indoor farms coming online.

AiFi’s Cashierless Checkout Powers New 4,000 Sq. Ft. Store in Shanghai

AiFi announced today that its technology is powering a new cashierless checkout store in Shanghai. According to an email sent to The Spoon, the 4,000 sq. ft. store carries 2,000 SKUs including fresh meat and snacks, and is the largest such store powered by AiFi’s technology.

AiFi is perhaps best known for its standalone, shipping container-sized NanoStores, which offer pop-up cashierless retail experiences. With today’s launch, the company is showing that its technology can scale up (at least a bit) and be used for larger-format stores. The new AiFi-powered store in Shanghai is a “hybrid” store that also features a human cashier should shoppers prefer that option.

Casherless checkout allows shoppers to walk into a store, grab what they want and leave, getting charged automatically upon exit. The global pandemic has accelerated interest in cashierless checkout retail experiences because they help reduce human-to-human interaction, and can also cut down on the amount of time shoppers spend inside a store. Fellow cashierless startup Zippin announced yesterday that it has partnered with Fujitsu to bring its technology to market in Japan.

Unlike Zippin, which uses a combination of shelf sensors and computer vision for its cashierless checkout solution, AiFi relies solely on computer vision to track shoppers as they move through a store. Those computer vision capabilities could soon get a boost, thanks to a recent investment in the company from Qualcomm Ventures, the venture arm of the chip giant. As we wrote at the time of the fundraise:

That a Qualcomm entity would invest in AiFi isn’t too surprising. AiFi’s stores rely on a lot of wireless technology, and the startup’s pitch is that it creates a faster retail experience by producing shopping receipts in real time. But Qualcomm is also moving more into computer vision, which is a cornerstone of cashierless checkout. In July, Qualcomm announced a chip cluster that adds machine learning and AI to mid-tier cameras. So investing in a company that gets that tech into more locations makes sense.

And AiFi is certainly looking to get into more locations. AiFi says it has partnerships with top grocery chains in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Earlier this year, AiFi announced that it was going to deploy 330 new and retrofitted stores around the world by the end of 2021.