food-automation
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Mark Chiappetta
Mark Chiappetta is the president and CEO of Oxipital AI, a Bedford, Massachusetts company that builds AI-driven machine vision for factory lines that pick, count, and inspect food. He is an electrical engineer who spent 30-plus years in robotics, including a run as a corporate VP at iRobot and eight years growing Soft Robotics from an early gripper startup. In 2024 he took the top job at Soft Robotics, then engineered the pivot that spun the company's 3D vision and AI software into Oxipital AI while the gripper hardware business was sold off. His pitch is that food processors will not rip out human lines for robots overnight, so Oxipital sells the eyes and brains first and the hands later.
Rajat Bhageria
Rajat Bhageria is the founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based company building AI-enabled robotic systems for flexible food assembly automation. After founding accessibility tech startup ThirdEye (acquired 2017) and co-founding pre-seed VC fund Prototype Capital, Bhageria launched Chef Robotics in 2019 to tackle the labor crisis in food manufacturing. The company has deployed robots across 12+ facilities in the US, Canada, and Europe, completing over 100 million food servings as of April 2026, backed by $72.7M in total funding. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), Bhageria is also a published scientist, author, and prolific writer with bylines in Forbes, TechCrunch, and HuffPost.