Rajat Bhageria is the Founder & CEO of Chef Robotics (San Francisco, CA), the leading physical AI company deploying AI-guided robot arms across food manufacturing and production facilities.
Instead of chasing restaurant cooking hype or $15/hr fast-casual makelines, Chef Robotics pivoted to high-volume food factories (including Amy's Kitchen, Chef Bombay, Gate Gourmet, and Sunbasket), recently surpassing 100M+ servings deployed in production across the US, Canada, and Europe.
After studying economics at Wharton and robotics at Penn's GRASP Lab, Rajat sold his first computer vision startup (ThirdEye) at age 20, co-founded pre-seed fund Prototype Capital, and launched Chef Robotics in 2019.
Backed by $65M+ in funding (from Kleiner Perkins, Avataar Ventures, Construct Capital, and SVB), Chef Robotics uses real-world production data to build domain-specific Food Foundation Models (FFM) and world models for deformable material handling.
𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑This podcast is brought to you by CoreWeave providing the specialized cloud infrastructure that powers physical AI and large-scale model training.
Chef Robotics: https://chefrobotics.ai
Rajat on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajatbhageria/
Ilir on X: https://x.com/IlirAliu_
Ilir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilir-aliu/
Timestamps:
0:00 Why Chef Robotics walked away from restaurant deals to focus on food factories
3:39 Growing up in Cincinnati: Reading biographies of Carnegie, Rockefeller & Edison
8:33 Building computer vision for the visually impaired (ThirdEye) at Penn
12:35 Basic research vs. Product execution: Why shipping matters
15:14 Why cooking robots fail: "Customers don't want cooking robots, they want assembly"
18:05 Expanding beyond prepared meals: Airline catering, meatpacking, and CPG kitting
22:04 Selling before building: Raising seed capital from Kleiner Perkins
25:34 Why every founder's primary job is persuasion and sales
33:23 The "Value Investing" approach in robotics: Finding high-volume factory assembly
36:08 Specialists vs. Humanoids: Why industrial plants need "Home Depot, not Costco"
41:34 Learning from the 2015 robotics graveyard: Why ROI trumps generalizability
46:28 Real-world production data vs. simulation: The Food Foundation Model
52:52 The Goal & Bottleneck Theory: Focusing strictly on operational constraints
59:20 Advice to my younger self: Category creation takes time
