Technology
What Chef Robotics' $43M funding means for fast casual automation
Since Sunbasket, a healthy meal delivery company, partnered with Chef Robotics in 2022, it has displaced 10% of production staff and increased consistency by 25% and throughput by 17%.
April 2, 2025 by Cherryh Cansler — Editor, FastCasual.com
Chef Robotics, the creators of AI-enabled robotic systems for meal assembly, has raised $43.1 million in Series A funding, which includes over $20 million in equity and $22.5 million in equipment financing debt to allow customers to purchase Robotics-as-a-Service, according to Rajat Bhageria, founder and CEO.
"Robotics is really having a moment right now," Bhageria said in a press release. "The innovations in AI have unlocked the potential of embodied AI for robotics. We believe we're in the pole position to scale given all the real-world production training data we already have."
The funding will also help Chef accelerate production deployments of its robotic systems, providing momentum for the real-world AI data engine flywheel that the company credits for its rapid growth rate of meals produced — over 44 million servings at a variety of brands, including Amy's Kitchen, meal delivery company Sunbasket, Chef Bombay and Cafe Spice — procuring more meals than all other existing food robotics startups combined, Bhageria said.
The road to automating fast casuals
Unlike several of its competitors — including Vebu, which is powering Chipotle's avocado bot, and Miso Robotics, which is behind the AI-powered robotic fry station, Fiippy, as well as Chipotle's chip-making technology, Chef is not yet working with fast casual brands, but Bhageria said it's only a matter of time
"Right now we work with high-volume food companies, but over time as our autonomy gets better, we plan to work with lower-volume food companies," Bhageria told FastCasual in an email interview. "Ultimately the goal is robots in every commercial kitchen."
Training data is imperative for a highly capable AI platform, but the food industry lacks off-the-shelf training data or physics-based simulation engines since food is deformable and doesn't always follow Newtonian mechanics, Bhageria said.
"In other words, to generate valuable training data, you need to deploy robots in production environments," he said. "And given everyone preps and cooks food differently, it's necessary to deploy robots at a wide variety of customers to see the highest breadth of foodstuffs and also simply deploy just a large number of robots in the world."
To start generating the data, Chef partnered with high-volume food companies where it could partially automate a food operation.
"We can help these customers overcome the labor shortage and increase production volume; at the same time, as Chef deploys more and more robots, Chef sees more depth and breadth of ingredients which makes our AI models more capable," Bhageria said. "These robots essentially act as data ingestion engines to improve our AI models. Furthermore, these deployments in industrial settings also allow Chef to substantially improve reliability, scale up customer support operations around the country and world, reduce the bill of materials, and spool up volume manufacturing."
The company can then leverage those systems to go from low-mix and high-volume applications like food production to high-mix and low-volume applications like ghost kitchens and ultimately, to deploying AI-enabled robots in every commercial kitchen in the country.
"At every step of the way, Chef will become more flexible and able to handle a higher surface area of edge cases, ultimately adding more and more value to a wider range of customers and applications," Bhageria said.
Data matters
As Chef's data collection grows, the systems' performance improves, which means more customers will use it to expand their businesses. Those expansions create more runtime in production leading to more data from the field; it also means that as Chef approaches new customers it can help manipulate ingredients from the get-go, further accelerating the flywheel's momentum, Bhageria said.
"AI in the physical world is happening right now with robotics. Food is one of the largest markets in the world. Industrial AI is already winning, and food packaging automation is quietly transforming how we get our meals," said Mohan Kumar, founder and managing partner of Avataar Ventures, the company leading the financing round, in an email interview. (Construct Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Promus Ventures, MFV Partners, Interwoven Ventures, HCVC, MaC Venture Capital, Red and Blue Ventures, Tau Partners, Alumni Ventures, Siddhi Capital and BOLD Capital Partners also participated in the funding, which brings Chef's total capital raised to $65.6 million.)
Additionally, the funds allow Chef to scale its go-to-market team and invest in non-engineering functions, including sales and marketing.
Sunbasket's automated system
Since Sunbasket, a San Francisco-based healthy meal delivery company, partnered with Chef in 2022, it has displaced 10% of staff required to do a run, increased consistency by 25% and increased throughput by 17%, according to Sunbasket SVP of Operations Mike Wargock, who was able to reallocate staff from production to other parts of the where more hands are needed.
"[My ideal solution] is very similar to the solution that has been presented to me by Chef Robotics," he said in a case study. "The robots can run consistently all day, it [sic] can run multiple shifts, and the flexibility that they present to me where they can just scoop and deposit anything that I want to put in there, just as well as people can."
Chef serves customers in the U.S. and Canada and plans to expand to the U.K. market by year's end.
About Cherryh Cansler
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