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Warehouses aren’t the only places experiencing a labor crunch. Since the beginning of the pandemic, restaurants around the world have been suffering from staff shortages. A number of startups have entered the picture with automation solutions, which aim to reduce the number of hands required to keep the lights on and the food warm.
There are a number of different robotic solutions for the commercial kitchen. Something like Miso is perhaps the most notable, partly due to the novelty of having a robotic arm to flip burgers.
Botinkit’s — short for “(ro)Bot in Kit(chen)” — the Omni lacks that level of physical flash, instead relying on a more standard kitchen appliance form factor. This means that it is a robot that does not explicitly look like a robot. It looks more like a self-service kiosk, right down to the touch screen. The system is kitchen-safe, of course, and is designed to be operated by a small crew of humans.
The Omni system can cook, stir-fry, and soup — basically anything you can cook in a wok, the robot should be able to handle with minimal human intervention. The Shenzhen-based startup says using the Omni system can effectively cut human labor requirements in the kitchen in half.
“When I think about what a kitchen will look like in 10 years, I think it doesn’t have to be the traditional way we see it today,” CEO Shirley Chen told TechCrunch. “So we decided to start with the hardest parts, the chef parts. When you use chefs, it’s very difficult to control consistency, because everything is based on human feeling.
When Chen co-founded Botinkit in 2021, she was a strategist at British accounting giant KPMG and a restaurateur. She says the unusual mix of roles put her in good stead to learn about the challenges restaurants face.
Investors are listening. The company announced a $13 million Series A in July 2023. With the Series A extension, that number is now $21 million.
Asia remains Putinkit’s largest market, but the startup has since expanded to Europe and the United States. This new funding will be directed towards expanding the company’s international reach.
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