Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup founded by Rajat Bhageria, has raised $20.6 million in Series A funding led by Avataar Ventures, alongside $22.5 million in equipment financing. The company builds AI-driven robotic arms to automate meal assembly in food processing plants — a sector hit hard by labor shortages and high turnover.
Bhageria said the work is “a lot more manual than we had expected,” with employees performing repetitive tasks in cold conditions. Chef’s AI robots have already assembled over 40 million meals, thanks to proprietary training data built in-house. Bhageria said that “you can’t download training data” for complex food handling, so Chef Robotics is teaching machines through imitation learning to adapt with precision.
Featured image: Rajat Bhageria, CEO of Chef Robotics. Credit: Chef Robotics
