Chef Robotics Raises $43M in Series A for Robotic Food Assembly

Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based automation company, has raised $43.1 million in a Series A funding round. This round consists of $20.6 million in equity and $22.5 million in equipment financing debt, as announced by the company on Monday. 

With this, Chef, currently serving the US and Canada, aims to expand its presence in the UK market this year.

Avataar Ventures led the equity round, with participation from 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. 

This funding brings Chef’s total capital raised to around $65.6 million ($38.8 million in equity and $26.75 million in debt). This funding will accelerate production deployments of the company’s AI-enabled robotic systems for meal assembly. 

“Robotics is having a moment right now. 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,” said Rajat Bhageria, founder and CEO of Chef Robotics. 

The equipment financing debt will cover the costs of robotic systems for robotics-as-a-service (RaaS), allowing customers to avoid upfront capital expenditures. The company plans to use the funds to scale its go-to-market team and invest in sales and marketing.

Chef has produced over 44 million meals through deployments at brands like Amy’s Kitchen and Sunbasket. The company relies on real-world production data to train its physical AI model, ChefOS, which is critical for improving system performance.

It also has AI-enabled robots deployed all over North America, which have completed tens of thousands of hours of active production and manipulated almost 2,000 ingredients in production.

Mohan Kumar, founder and managing partner at Avataar Ventures, noted, “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.” 

Bhageria also expressed that in the future, the company aims to expand its fleet of intelligent robots, accelerate customer deployments across both its existing and new customers, advance ChefOS, grow its go-to-market team, and expand internationally.