Having worked in the food industry for several years, Shirley Chen saw firsthand the challenges of managing staff and training for restaurant expansion. So when she met her future co-founders, she saw an opportunity to leverage their expertise in chemistry and electrical and electronic engineering, along with her own food and beverage background, to start a robotics company that could automate and standardize cooking for restaurant chains.
In 2021, Chen co-founded botinkit in Shenzhen and soon took the start-up’s cooking robots beyond its home base to markets such as Japan and the US. Thanks to its steady expansion, Botinkit announced today that it has raised $13 million in a Series A round that will be used in part for its expansion in the Middle East and Europe next year.
Forebright led the round, with investors including 5Y Capital and Brizan Venture participating. With this latest cash injection, Botinkit has raised nearly $20 million in funding to date.
Perhaps the most notable investor of the round Zexiang Li, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology known for his angel investment in the drone giant DJI. HKUST, where Chen studied, has grown into a hub for hardware innovation, with students turning their academic research into commercial ideas.
Meanwhile, Li and his investment partner Gao Bingqiang, also an HKUST professor, have supported their students with money and other resources. Gao is also an investor in Botinkit.
Scale up restaurants with robots
While Botinkit sees California-based Miso Robotics as a potential competitor, the companies are increasing several cooking skills.
Miso’s burger-flipping robots have helped it land deals with chain giants like Jack in the Box and White Castle. Meanwhile, Botinkit’s wok-shaped robot specializes in stir-frying and braising and has an extra arm that can take over humans when adding ingredients. The company is currently developing a deep fryer model, which will make its debut next year.
Automation, Botinkit claims, helps reduce ingredient loss by 30% and energy by 40% compared to commercial gas stoves. But another key selling point of his robots is their ability to facilitate the cross-regional expansion of restaurants, Chen said in an interview with JS.
One of the biggest hurdles restaurants face in expanding is finding and training a large number of staff, which can slow their growth. Even if they manage to attract enough staff, maintaining consistent quality control can be a challenge in new markets.
A typical 100-square-foot kitchen requires six to 10 staff, according to Chen, but with Botinkit’s robots, that number can be reduced to just one or two. This means that a franchise restaurant with 500 locations could potentially reduce its kitchen staff from 5,000 to several hundred.
“In the past, cuisine was limited by time and geographical boundaries,” Chen suggested. “However, with the digitization of cooking, all kinds of new possibilities are emerging, including remote cooking. Say I’m in Shenzhen and you’re in the US, I can use our software and hardware system to “cook” for you remotely. It is an incredibly exciting prospect.”
Botinkit’s current robots come with temperature sensors, but the startup is allocating part of its new funding to developing multimodal sensors that can also detect tastes and smells. The ultimate goal, Chen said, is to use artificial general intelligence, or AGI, so the robots can understand human preferences and fine-tune cooking processes based on data feedback.
While the majority of Botinkit’s revenue comes from hardware sales, the company has begun generating revenue by creating custom recipes for its customers through its global network of collaborative chefs. Its customers range from fast food chains and hotels to catering services and supermarkets. In China, his robots have cooked at food stands at Walmart and Delibowl.
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