food-robotics
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Nala Robotics and the problem of the last dirty plate
A robot can fry a wing. Nala Robotics wants it to sauce the wing, box the pizza and put away the dishes, too. The interesting part is what happens between those tasks.
Kish Shin Is Teaching a Kitchen to Arrive Right on Time
His robotic food truck cooks Korean barbecue while it moves. The more revealing idea is quieter: technology earns its place in a kitchen only when the meal arrives hot, consistent, and worth eating again.
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.
The Restaurant That Refused to Wait for You
Shin Starr spent years putting a kitchen inside a truck. The clever part was not removing the driver. It was teaching dinner to arrive at the same moment as the customer.
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.