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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Pudu Robotics

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Double (Alt) Cheese Funding & Big Money for Misfits

Fall is upon us in the Pacific Northwest, and alongside autumn colors and windy weather is lots and lots of food tech venture capital. This week’s funding news includes not one but two alt-mozzarella startups, a monster round for ugly produce online retailer Misfits Market, and three pieces of food robot funding news.

On to it:

Plant-Based Food

Sophie’s Kitchen – $5.6 Million: Sophie’s Kitchen has raised $5.6 million to fund the growth of its plant-based seafood lineup of products. The company, founded in 2010, offers a line of alt-seafood products, including crab cakes, shrimp, salmon, and tuna. Billy Goat Brands led the round, a Canadian venture fund focused on sustainability. Sophie’s Kitchen products can currently be found at Walmart, Sprouts, and Wegmans. The funding continues the momentum for the plant-based seafood category, which saw $116 million in funding in the first half of 2021 (compared to $26 million for the whole of 2020).

Growthwell – $22 Million: Singapore-based plant-based seafood and chicken maker Growthwell has raised a $22 million Series A led by Creadev. The company, which raised $8 million last year, “owns a portfolio of alternative protein companies aimed at Southeast Asian consumers, including OKK (plant-based meat), Su Xian Zi (vegan mutton), and gomama (ready to eat dishes made from plants).” They also sell a chickpea protein powder called ChickP for use in meat and dairy alternatives.

NUMU Food Group: Plant-based cheese startup NUMU has raised early in September. The amount of the funding was undisclosed. The company makes plant-based mozzarella from potato starch, soybeans, and coconut oil. Started a former DJ named Gunars Elmuts, NUMU sells its cheese to food service providers in shreds and blocks.

Precision Fermentation

Formo – $50 Million: Berlin-based Formo announced it had raised $50 million in Series A funding. The investment in the maker of animal-free cheese was led by EQT Ventures, with Elevat3 Capital and Lowercarbon Capital. Formo uses a precision fermentation process to make animal-free dairy cheese with animal identical proteins. The company plans to use the funding to “With the resulting increase in R&D capacity, Formo intends to expand its product portfolio to represent a wide variety of European dairy specialties such as mozzarella and ricotta, with techniques designed in collaboration with artisan cheesemakers.“

Food Robots

Pudu Robotics – $78 Million: China-based Pudu Robotics announced this week it had raised a $78 million C2 found of financing, matching the same dollar amount for its May C1 funding round. In total, the company has raised $156 million in Series C financing. The company makes a few different types of bots, including a front-of-house bot called the Bellabot, a cleaning bot, and two models of delivery bots.

Keenon Robotics – $200 Million: Another China-based robotics startup Keenon Robotics has raised an impressive round with its $200 million Series D. Its round was led by Softbank. Like Pudu Robotics, Keenon also makes food delivery and front-of-house food service bots and robots for hospitals.

Daxbot – $211 Thousand Crowdfunding: This week, Daxbot, a maker of sidewalk food delivery robots, launched its equity crowdfunding raise. Like many food robot startups, Daxbot is using StartEngine for its raise, and the company has already (as of this writing) raised $211 thousand from 136 investors. Today the company’s robots are being used for food delivery in Philomath, Oregon.

Online Grocery

Misfits Market – $225M Series C-1: Online grocer Misfits Market announced it had raised almost a quarter billion in new funding via a Series C-1 round. It’s a quick turnaround for more capital for the sustainability-focused online grocer that works with farmers and food producers to save ugly produce and food that otherwise would go into the compost bin; the company raised a $200 million Series C in April. Misfits Market joins fellow ugly food retailer Imperfect Foods as one of the companies that have tapped investor interest in the food waste space.

Smart Vending

Foodles – €31 million: Smart corporate food vending/catering startup Foodles has raised a €31 million Series B round from InfraVia Growth and Bpifrance via its Large Venture fund, and follow on rounds from existing investors, Creadev, DN Capital, and Adelie. The French company offers connected fridges, which it calls canteens that it supplies with food. According to the company, each fridge can provide food to up to 59 employees. The company hopes to disrupt a European contract catering market worth 240 billion euros.

Food Supply Chain Software

Grubmarket – $120 Million: Grubmarket, a provider of software and services to enable food producers, has raised a $120 million Series E round. The company’s software enables food producers and distributors to manage inventory, pricing, customer relations, and other company-related operations. The company’s announced hinted in the announcement that they will likely expand from just software into robotics in the future: “GrubMarket will likely also start to explore connected hardware to help those customers, too: robotics for picking and moving items” related to those activities managed by its supply chain oriented software.

Restaurant Tech

SpotOn – $300 Million: Payments software startup SpotOn announced this week it has raised a $300 million Series E to help finance the acquisition of Appetize, a mobile and digital payments startup focused on sports and entertainment venues, amusement parks, and zoos. Mega-VC Andreessen Horowitz led the deal (as they did SpotOn’s last round). A16z’s eagerness to inject more capital into SpotOn probably has a lot to do with the company’s tripling of revenue over the past 18 months. SpotOn, which has traditionally focused on SMBs (the segment of the restaurant space that has been the most aggressive in modernizing its tech stack during the pandemic), will now be able to sell into the enterprise market with the newly acquired Appetize.

Pudu Server Robots Find Work in Grocery Aisles

Up to this point, when we’ve covered floor robots in grocery stores, the news has usually been about autonomous shelf scanners and floor cleaners. But as a recently released video from Pudu Robotics shows, we could soon be seeing robots that act as mobile advertising and promotional displays roaming around grocery aisles.

Amy Zhou, a Business Development Manager at Pudu Robotics, posted a video on Linkedin this week showing her company’s robots being put to work in various grocery stores around the world. The work shown in the video isn’t terribly exciting, as its mainly a lone robot carrying racks of food items that are on sale. But the move is another example of the mobile commerce trend that I predicted will have a breakout year in 2021.

Pudu’s move into grocery is reminiscent of Cheetah Mobile’s FANBOT, though FANBOT is a little more complex. Where Pudu’s robot just roams around carrying items that you then must purchase at the stores checkout, the FANBOT actually carries an inventory of different items and carries out the transaction to purchase them on the spot.

The idea is bringing commerce to where you are, rather than having you seek it out.

Pudu’s type of robotic mobile advertising could be appealing to grocery retailers. Having a mobile robot or two would give retailers another vehicle (literally) on which they could charge for placement/advertising. As a bonus, multiple, different promotions could be run in a single day. Heck, you could combine the dynamism of a Cooler Screen LED panel with the Pudu robot and have a big, bright, shiny commercial going up and down the aisles.

These types of promo robots might also find more acceptance within grocery stores themselves. Walmart ended its use of Bossa Nova’s shelf-scanning robots this year reportedly in part over concerns with how customers were reacting to the robots. There’s a difference between seeing a six-foot tall robot scanning a shelf and spotting a tray of chocolate bars headed in your direction.

Additionally, these type of self-wandering promo robots wouldn’t be taking a current job (like inventory management) away from a human, but rather adding a new one.

Plus — and this could be the biggest reason we’ll see more of Pudu’s robots in stores — at least one model is has cat-like features and makes a cute face when you pet it.

Pudu Robotics Raises $15M in Series B+ Round

Chinese delivery robot company Pudu Robotics (aka Pudu Tech) announced this week that it has completed a Series B+ round of nearly $15 million in funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital China with participation from existing investors Meituan, Everwin Investment, QC Capital, and Chengbohan Fund.

Pudu makes self-driving restaurant server robots equipped with racks of trays that can shuttle plates of food and empty dishes to and from the kitchen.

This B+ funding comes on the heels of Pudu Robotics’ Series B fundraise of $15 million, which the company announced on July 1 of this year. The B+ round brings the total amount of announced funding raised by Pudu to roughly $30 million. (Crunchbase lists prior Series A, Seed and Angel rounds of undisclosed amounts.)

According to today’s press announcement, Pudu’s robots have been sold to more than 20 countries and regions around the world. Earlier this month, Pudu announced that the Muhguri restaurant is Sokcho, South Korea now had 11 Pudu robots serving food to customers.

Pudu is certainly not alone in creating a new robotic labor force for restaurants. Other players in the space include fellow Chinese company Keenon Robotics, California-based Bear Robotics, and South Korea’s Woowa Bros., which has partnered with LG for server bots.

Pudu said this latest funding would be used to expand its market. The money is coming just as the global pandemic has restaurants reassessing their dine-in businesses. Server robots like Pudu’s remove one possible vector of human-to-human viral transmission, and come with the added benefit of not getting sick themselves.

While that may be good news in terms of not spreading the coronavirus, the increased use of robots means fewer jobs for humans. A recent survey from Aaron Allen & Associates found that more than 80 percent of restaurant jobs could be automated, with the majority of them being server positions.

That stat, of course, brings up a host of other societal issues, but right now, most people are pre-occupied with the more immediate pandemic-related problems.