Revolutionizing the food industry with robotics and AI

Rajat is the Founder and CEO of Chef Robotics. Prior to Chef, Rajat was Founder and Managing Partner at Prototype Capital, a pre-seed venture capital fund investing in founders who apply new technology to old industries. Before that, Rajat was the Founder and CEO of ThirdEye, where he led a team to build a product that empowers the visually impaired by recognizing what’s in front of them; ThirdEye was ultimately sold. Rajat has written a book about education reform, published a scientific paper in electrical engineering, and written for Forbes about entrepreneurship. He has a Master’s degree in Robotics and Machine Learning from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s in Economics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Prior to Chef, Ray served as the COO and Co-Founder of Specific Diagnostics from 2013 until its acquisition by bioMerieux Inc. in 2022 for $425M. During his tenure, he led development, manufacturing, and operations, with responsibilities extending to marketing, customer engagements, fundraising, finance, and business development at different stages of the company's growth.

Before Specific, Ray was at Symbol Technologies, acquired by Motorola Solutions, and finally acquired by Zebra Technologies (NASDAQ: ZBRA); here, he served in increasing positions from engineer to VP of Engineering to General Manager to SVP Marketing and finally CTO over 14 years. During his time at Symbol, the company grew from $20M to over $2B in annual revenue. As a General Manager, he led teams that launched products – sold to manufacturing companies and retail companies – supporting annual revenues of over $1.5B. Under his leadership, Symbol pioneered mobile computers, barcode scanners, and wireless networks (WiFi), becoming the first-to-market with WiFi products.

Lyz joined Chef in 2025 to lead the Finance function with 7+ years experience specifically in robotics, automation, AI, and high-growth technology companies. As Corporate Controller at Bright Machines, she led the company’s go-public preparedness, overseeing its first PCAOB audit and successful S-4 filing. Prior to that, as Director of Finance at Kindred AI, she managed the accounting function through a $36M Series C funding round and the company’s subsequent acquisition by Ocado PLC.

With a background in public accounting and strong experience in business operations, fundraising, and M&A, Lyz has worked across various stages of growth and a range of company functions. She obtained her executive MBA at the Wharton School in 2023 and her expertise includes audit readiness, financial reporting, and strategic planning in technology-focused industries.

Nicolas joined Chef after more than six years at Boston Dynamics, where he served as Senior Director of Sales and built and led the commercial team that brought the company’s warehouse automation products to customers worldwide. Prior to Boston Dynamics, he spent 12 years at ABB in a variety of sales, business development, and commercial leadership roles. During that time, he developed the company’s North American business in robotic assembly and test applications and built engineering and sales support teams in Silicon Valley and Michigan.

Justine is a seasoned people and recruiting operations leader with a proven track record of building and scaling high-performing teams at early-stage and growth-stage robotics and AI companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Driven by a passion for fostering talent and shaping company culture, Justine has built recruiting and people operations functions from the ground up, working closely with leadership to drive strategic growth. At Kindred AI and Rapid Robotics, she successfully scaled engineering and product organizations by 4x, established foundational teams, and implemented talent strategies that attract and retain top industry talent. Her ability to align people operations with business objectives has played a key role in helping companies thrive in fast-paced, high-growth environments.

Luis is one of Chef Robotics' founding engineers and now leads the Autonomy team, responsible for robotics software, perception, and AI/ML. As robotics software lead from the earliest days, he architected much of the on-robot stack and helped scale it from first prototype to a fleet of nearly 100 robots that have served more than 100 million servings in production.

Luis has spent most of the past decade building robots that handle food. Before Chef, he was a robotics and controls engineer at Verb Surgical (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), where he developed control software for the surgical robotics platform and led the team's simulation and software quality efforts. Prior to that, he was the lead software engineer on eatsa's automated bowl assembly machine, developing software across dozens of networked devices to autonomously assemble meals. Earlier in his career, he built search ranking systems for YouTube at Google and high-frequency trading infrastructure. He holds a degree in Mechatronics Engineering from Olin College of Engineering.

Inkyu is a Senior Staff AI Research Scientist at Chef Robotics, where he works on physical AI for food automation. He builds end-to-end robot learning pipelines with vision-language-action (VLA) models, world models, and imitation and reinforcement learning to teach bimanual robots to assemble meals like burgers and salad bowls.

Inkyu began his career as a software engineer at Samsung Electronics, developing software for its first Android smartphone collaborating with Google, before moving into robotics, where he has spent more than 15 years building systems that perceive, learn, and act across aerial, ground, and field settings. Before Chef, he was a technical lead at Tencent’s XR Vision Lab, working on visual-inertial SLAM and multi-camera calibration, and a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO, where he led local navigation for Team CSIRO Data61 in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Earlier, at ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL), he worked in agricultural robotics, introducing weedNet and weedMap, deep-learning frameworks for semantic weed mapping from aerial imagery, and co-authoring an early, widely cited study on controlling a quadrotor with reinforcement learning. His DeepFruits fruit-detection system was an early step toward the food-focused robotics he builds today.

Inkyu holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Queensland University of Technology. He is an IEEE Senior Member and an associate editor for the Journal of Field Robotics (JFR) and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), with more than 6,800 citations across his research.

Marc leads Customer Support at Chef Robotics, supporting fleet performance, reliability, utilization, and continuous improvement across Chef’s deployed robotic systems.

He has spent the past decade scaling industrial automation and physical AI systems. Before Chef, he led Global Services at Dexterity, setting up for scale of the fleet from 10 to 100 robotic systems across North America and Japan. He led the launch of Dexterity’s joint venture with Sumitomo Corporation, launched three physical AI product lines, and developed an incident-response system that achieved response times of less than 5 minutes.

Earlier in his career, he worked in Amazon’s Reliability & Maintenance Engineering organization, where he helped scale more than 10 robotic products from R&D into large-scale operations. He supported the launch of 15 Amazon facilities and led improvements that increased existing robotic systems to an 84% OEE score.

Marc studied Industrial Trades and Engineering Systems Technology at Chattanooga State before continuing his education in Industrial Management and Applied Engineering at Southern Illinois University.

Jay leads the Applications Engineering team at Chef Robotics, overseeing customer qualification, deployment, and production ramp-up to help food manufacturers successfully integrate robotic automation into their operations. His team works closely with customers to accelerate adoption and deliver reliable production outcomes across Chef's customer deployments.

Prior to joining Chef, Jay held engineering and technical leadership roles at Carbon, AREVO, and Stratasys, where he helped manufacturers deploy advanced manufacturing technologies at production scale across North America, Europe, and Asia. Throughout his career, he has led customer engineering organizations supporting global manufacturers as they adopted advanced manufacturing technologies across aerospace, automotive, consumer products, medical devices, dental, and food manufacturing.

Jay earned a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota.

Charlotte is a marketing generalist with 8+ years of experience in high-growth B2B tech startups. Before joining Chef Robotics, she led communications and content marketing at Applied Intuition, helping scale the company from 100 to 1,000 employees in under four years. At Applied, Charlotte directed one funding and four acquisition announcements (including a take-private), launched joint marketing initiatives with over a dozen customers such as Porsche, Audi, Nissan, and Caterpillar, and produced the company’s first in-house conference with 300 attendees and 18 speakers, including Marc Andreessen (a16z), Dieter Zetsche (Mercedes-Benz), and Rick Wagoner (GM). Prior to Applied, she was the first marketing hire at the automotive API startup Smartcar, where she built the content marketing function and increased web and blog traffic by 340% year over year.

Charlotte holds an MA in Journalism from Stanford University, a BA in Philosophy from UC Berkeley, and a BA in Social Sciences from Sciences Po Paris. Her passion for technical products, B2B audiences, and full-stack marketing execution, combined with her ability to evolve a company’s brand voice through various stages of growth, makes her a natural fit for Chef Robotics.

Zach Gomez has built a career by introducing disruptive technologies to companies around the world. In fields such as collaborative robotics, exoskeletons, vision, and AI/ML/RL, he has focused on helping customers maximize the value of these technologies and drive innovation throughout their organizations.

Zach began his career as one of the founding GTM team members at Rethink Robotics, introducing some of the first cobots into industrial applications. As a customer success leader with Kindred, he navigated growth from six to nearly 200 deployments and ultimately the acquisition by Ocado in 2021. Before joining Chef, Zach was Sr. Director, Global Logistics Business, at Realtime Robotics, focused on helping customers deploy industrial robots more easily than ever before to meet the growing demand of the logistics market.