Rajat Bhageria of Chef Robotics

Rajat Bhageria is a genius that’s revolutionizing the food industry. He founded Chef Robotics, a company that uses AI-powered robot arms to take the labor out of large-scale food production.

AI automation is changing business and accelerating at record speed. Its capabilities have allowed the world of business to most faster, more agile, and efficient that ever before. One man, Rajat Bhageria, is taking AI to food production, bringing excitement to what some see as a boring business.

He’s an immigrant success story with his family coming from India to America to when he was younger, where he was raised in Cincinnati. Unlike many young entrepreneurs, Bhageria finished his higher education, earning a bachelor’s and master’s from Ivy-league University of Pennsylvania.

His company, Chef Robotics, was founded in 2019 with the intention of building robots that can help make food in processing plants. These processing plants typically rely on temporary workers who work in poor conditions. As such, this industry faces a high amount of turnover.

Bhageria decided to solve this problem by bringing automation to the industry. At first, it was very hard as food textures are unique and it’s hard for machines to serve the correct portions of food. Unlike a automated dispenser that may be found in a soft drink factory, there are much more variables that go into food. Also, seeing the lack of training data for solutions like this, he decided to build his own training data so to teach the robots how to serve food.

Chef Robotics is certainty not the only company using automation in the food industry. Major companies like Chipotle have implemented automation for some of their simpler tasks. With companies like those having deeper pockets that Chef Robotics, some may worry about Chef Robotics future. However, Bhageria’s focus and tunnel vision on the pre-packaging assembly part of the food production business has been their competitive edge. As recently as last year, the company raised over $20 million to continue building AI robot arms.