We’re excited to share that Chef Robotics has raised a $43.1M financing round in a combination of equity and debt! This brings Chef’s total capital raised to ~$65.6M ($38.8M in equity and $26.75M in equipment financing). The equity round was led by Avataar Venture Partners and included investments from Construct Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Promus Ventures, MFV Partners, Interwoven, HCVC, Alumni Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Red and Blue Ventures, Tau Partners, Siddhi Capital, and BOLD Capital Partners. The debt was from Silicon Valley Bank, a Division of First Citizens Bank and will be used to finance robotic systems for our Robotics-as-a-Service solution.
This financing is a great vote of confidence for both what we’ve built and also for the pull we’re seeing from our customers. We’re grateful for our customers, team, investors, and partners for their support to get to this milestone!
Robotics is at an extremely exciting time where AI is really unlocking its potential. But before we talk about all the exciting work we’re doing and going to do to harness it, I thought it may be useful to talk about how we got here.
Why we started Chef
When we started Chef, we wanted to focus on the industry with the most dire need for robotics. We realized the food industry is that. It’s the 3rd largest labor force in the U.S. and the only larger markets - retail salespeople and nursing / personal care aids - are not tractable today.
Further, it was apparent that the food industry had a hair-on-fire problem – a crushing labor shortage. In 2023, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics, there were 1,137,000 jobs unfilled in food preparation and service, the #1 labor shortage in the U.S. As the pain becomes more acute (especially given the recent political climate), food companies are more aggressively seeking out alternatives. In some cases, this means efforts to offshore parts of the food supply chain to other countries where there is more labor available. We realized this is an existential problem and given the lack of human labor, robotic labor is necessary to keep production onshore.
As we talked to more folks in the food industry, we learned that the existing solutions - mostly mechatronic dispensers and depositors - are not flexible enough to handle the highly variable nature of food.
Thus we built Chef’s AI-enabled robots to mimic the flexibility of humans, thereby allowing food companies to increase production volume while keeping the American food supply chain onshore.
Notably, we didn’t start with restaurants as customers as many food robotics companies before us have. The crux of this was the AI cold start problem; specifically, for food manipulation, there’s no off-the-shelf training data you can download from the internet and there are no physics-based simulation engines that work well since food is deformable, sticky, and wet. In other words, to generate valuable training data, we learned that you need to deploy robots in production environments.
When we thought about starting with restaurants, we ran into the chicken and egg problem - to enable robots that are flexible enough to add value, we need a highly capable AI, but to get a highly capable AI, we need real-world training data from customer sites. Thus, we decided to initially deploy robots in high-mix food production and manufacturing environments where Chef could partially automate a food operation and thus add value in production to customers without requiring 100% full autonomy from the get-go. We built Chef’s systems on modern advancements in AI to make them highly flexible and adaptable enough to “pick” and plate almost any ingredient, no matter how it’s cut, cooked, or grown; this makes them an ideal solution for assembling or plating food.
Where we are today
Since we shipped our first robots into production, Chef robots have produced over 44,000,000 servings and counting, more meals than all other existing food robotics startups combined. Chef has AI-enabled robots deployed all over North America, which have done tens of thousands of hours of active production and have manipulated almost 2,000 ingredients in production. We have quickly cemented our standing as the industry leader in AI-enabled food robotics.
Where we're going next, and why we raised this capital
Advancement of our embodied AI model, ChefOS
All of the real-world data from those 44M servings is critical to Chef since our AI models rely on production data for training. This funding allows us to accelerate the development of these physical AI models trained on real-world data.
Further scaling customer deployments
Deployments are the fuel that feeds our AI data engine flywheel. Given that food is highly variable – not only between ingredients but also the hour-by-hour given the organic nature of food – high volumes of production data at customer sites over prolonged periods of time are essential for optimal model performance. The more data Chef collects in the field, the more its systems' performance improves; as performance improves, Chef’s robotic systems are utilized more and customers expand their robotic fleets; this expansion in turn creates more runtime in production leading to more training data, further accelerating the flywheel’s momentum. It also means that when Chef approaches new customers, Chef can help manipulate their ingredients from the get-go, further accelerating the flywheel’s momentum.
Scaling out GTM
This infusion of funds will also enable Chef to scale its go-to-market team and efforts. Up to this point, we’ve been very focused on a set of large enterprise and mid-market customers, iterating on the product and technology with them, and scaling within them. The funding round equips Chef to further invest in non-engineering functions like sales and marketing to scale its deployments at net new customers as well as its current customers.
Scaling Internationally
Food is universal and is one of the largest labor markets on the planet. In addition to scaling in the U.S. and Canada, we’re excited to take the technology overseas.
What does the future hold?
Over time, our AI flywheel will also allow Chef to expand to other parts of the food ecosystem. As the models become more and more autonomous – handling more ingredients and ever more of the long tail edge cases – we can leverage these systems to go from applications like industrial food production (high volume, high mix) to ghost kitchens (mid volume, high mix) and ultimately, to deploying AI-enabled robots in every commercial kitchen in the country (low volume, high mix). In other words, once the AI learns how to manipulate shredded chicken in a large industrial kitchen, it can leverage the same model to manipulate a similar shredded chicken in a commercial kitchen. At every step of the way, Chef is becoming more flexible and able to handle a higher number of edge cases, ultimately adding more and more value to a wider range of customers and applications. So although we’ve chosen food production as a starting point, we see it as just that… a start.
What gets us out of bed daily? The reality is that AI is fundamentally unlocking the potential of robotics. We believe in a future where there are billions of flexible robots deployed all over the world that are helping us live our lives. But to create that future, the robots industry as a whole needs a success story - one driven not by dollars raised from investors but rather by the number of robots deployed in real-world production environments. We hope and are working hard to create a future where Chef can be a pioneer in that realm, especially in manipulation-based robotics. Why do we think that? There are some industries where the market needs and the technology readiness is a better fit than others; we believe that the food industry is the right industry to create that future - the market size, pain point, and technology readiness are all ripe. Over time, with success, we hope to inspire the next generation of robotics founders, engineers, operators, and investors to pursue robotics and thereby collectively accelerate the advent of intelligent machines in the world.
Onwards!
