The Story of Chef Robotics

This interview is with Rajat Bhageria, an investor and technology founder who debuted his food robot after working stealthily for five years. Bhageria, a master’s graduate of Penn’s Robotics and Machine Learning Lab, started his first company in high school, a social network for young writers. During college and grad school, he founded Third Eye, a company using computer vision to assist the visually impaired. I got to know Rajat in 2019 when he spoke at our food robotics conference called ArticulaTE. At the time, he was just getting started exploring the idea of food robotics while also running his venture capital firm Prototype Capital. He took this knowledge and what he learned as an investor and started Chef, a company that makes a food robot that assembles cooked and ready-to-eat food in high-volume environments. This focus, says Bhageria, is much different from the bulk of robots in the market, most of which focus primarily on prep and cooking in restaurants and food service. In this conversation, we talk about: Why it's important to have great data when building vertical-specific robot like Chef Why Rajat felt that restaurants is the wrong part of the value chain to start building food robot How early founders should focus on understanding the pain points of their future clients before building their product Why Rajat believes that home food robots will never be a big market Where he sees this space going over the next decade and much more! If you'd like to explore how AI and automation will change food, you won't want to miss our upcoming Food AI Summit on September 25th. Visit the website and use the coupon code PODCAST to get 15% off tickets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices