food-robotics
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Stephen Klein
Stephen Klein is the co-founder and CEO of Hyphen, a San Jose food-robotics company that builds the automated Makeline - a hybrid manual-and-robotic assembly system that runs beneath the counter to build bowls and plates at up to 350 meals per hour. A self-described foodservice fanatic since childhood, Klein started a text-to-order frozen yogurt business in college, helped scale Instacart in its early days, and ran operations at robotic coffee bar Cafe X before launching Hyphen in 2020 with co-founder Daniel Fukuba. Hyphen has since drawn investment from Tiger Global, Chipotle and Cava and deployed systems with chains and foodservice operators across the country.
Shin Starr Presents Corp.
Shin Starr Presents Corp. is a Korean-American foodtech company building autonomous, AI-powered robotic kitchens. Its 'Autowok' system - a modular, Lego-block robotics platform - cooks Korean BBQ and seafood with minimal human intervention, including inside moving OLHSO food trucks that finish dishes 'en route' so meals arrive minutes after cooking. Founded in 2019 by Kish Shin and Jay Shin, the company operates OLHSO branded trucks and a San Mateo restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area and is targeting airports, campuses, and corporate cafeterias for expansion.
Yo-Kai Express
Yo-Kai Express is a California-based food-tech company that builds autonomous restaurant kiosks - vending-machine-sized robot kitchens that cook fresh, chef-quality ramen and other hot meals in about 60-90 seconds, 24 hours a day. Founded in 2016 by former semiconductor engineer Andy Lin, the company applies chip-manufacturing precision to food, flash-freezing partially cooked ingredients and rapid-heating them on demand. Its machines operate in airports, hospitals, universities, offices, and transit hubs across North America, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
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.