A 20.6 million dollar robot chef is raised to continue to build Ai Robot Arms

As the food services industry continues to struggle through a lack of employment, an artificial autonomous company in Silicon Valley gathered artificial robots ready for registration.

Chef Robotics raised $ 20.6 million in a series of financing A series led by Avataar Ventures. The tour includes an additional amount of $ 22.5 million in equipment financing to maintain the construction of automatic meal collection systems for startups.

The CEO of Rajaga Bhajaria and his team founded the company in 2019 with the aim of building robots that could help compensate human workers in food processing factories, which often witness a high rotation rate due to the nature of the job, forcing dependence on temporary workers.

“There are rooms for hundreds of people, and they ignore food for eight hours a day in the Fahrenheit room 34 degrees,” said Bahajriya, whose activist is in San Francisco. “It is much more manual than we expected.”

Alionic chefs are long arms with multiple joints wrapped in a protective cover. The arms hang from the metal shelves that sit next to the food assembly lines. This allows weapons to collect different components and spread them in pre -packed meal containers, such as how human workers can. Robots are particularly suitable for joining assembly lines where humans have to make frequent movements.

The changing nature of food preparation has made it difficult for the industry to provide more automation in the past. Bahjari said that the difference in the consistency of food makes it difficult for machines to provide the right parts of the food. Part of the problem stems from the lack of training data for teaching machinery how to deal with different foods. Do not meet the typical automatic distributor found in processing factories – such as those that may fill the bottles with the Spanish, for example – the needs of Chef Robotics.

“I can only go to the Internet and download training data – how can you process berries without crushing it?” Bahajriya said. “This does not exist.”

Bahjari said that to solve this, Chef Robotics builds her training data to teach her automatic arms how to properly provide food. Indeed, these “chefs” have produced more than 40 million meals, Bahjari said.

Automation in the food services industry is not a completely new concept, especially at the restaurant level, as fast fast chains such as Chipotle, SweetGreen and Starbucks have been invested greatly in automation over the past few years of burger heart, mixing salads and more.

The Chef Robotics concentration on the advance assembly part of the team allowed the building of what Bhageria called “Trench” of training data to add more ingredients while expanding their business to more customers.

With the new cash leakage, the main goal of Chef Robotics is to expand more factories and manufacturers in the United States and Canada. Bahjari said that he also hopes to accelerate the imitation learning capabilities of robots, which means that the company can teach robot weapons how to perform a procedure by clarifying the arm instead of writing the code that concludes it.

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