More bad news on the food robot front.
Karakuri, a startup that made a robotic food kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals, is shutting down, according to founder Barney Wragg.
In a post on Linkedin, Wragg cited the pandemic and the challenging fundraising environment as the reason for the news and included a link to a Google Sheet with Karakuri employees who Wragg said it was “incumbent” on him to assist in finding new roles.
From the post:
It’s with a very heavy heart that I have to report that our journey at Karakuri is coming to an end.
For the past five years, we’ve developed and deployed robotics for the QSR industry. We’ve survived many challenges, including the pandemic and our bank going bust us, but sadly we’ve been unable to find the funding we need to move to the next level.
Most of all I’d like to thank the incredible team we’ve built. They’ve stayed dedicated to the challenge and built incredible technologies in the face of abject uncertainty.
It’s incumbent on me to help these great people find new roles, spread their wings, and share their talents with others.
Attached is a list of the folks who are available and their preferred contact details.
Please feel free to reach out to anybody you think you need or could help find new roles.
I’m also on hand to help in any way I can.
Thanks, Barney
While it’s a bummer Karakuri couldn’t survive, it’s not surprising. Food robotic startups suffer from several disadvantages, including incredibly long development cycles and being capital-intensive.
Ex-Picnic CEO Clayton Wood summed it up well in a Linkedin post where he explained that a food automation startup’s “existential risk is being successful enough at the seed stage and building momentum (and costs) toward your scaling stage, only to find no Series A/B/C investors. Without planning and execution, you will be unable to survive. Progress means spending–and cutting spending to stay alive eliminates progress.”
Clayton says he believes newer startups will benefit from an earlier recognition that they need be frugal from the outset, unlike many of the first-generation food robot startups who launched in what was a more friendly fundraising era.
I also expect more food robot startups will start to look to commercialize a product or a subsystem more quickly in order to get to positive revenue faster. As I wrote a few months ago after our food robotics mini-summit, investors like Buck Jordan see a path to revenue through offering a portion of a founder’s big idea to the market instead of waiting years until the full vision is realized.
“I suspect that some robotics companies who are a little more responsible, or a little more revenue-oriented, are going to start paring down their objectives,” said Jordan.
Jordan pointed to Creator, a maker of fully roboticized restaurants, as an example of a company he believes has valuable technology that could be ‘parted out’ to the market and be successful.
Make that had valuable technology. Creator didn’t ever sell a portion of its systems and instead tried to make a full robotic restaurant. The company shut down in March.
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