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.

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

Ep 111 | Customers Don't Want Cooking Robots, They Want Assembly (w/ Rajat Bhageria, Chef Robotics)

22Astronauts

Ep 111 | Customers Don't Want Cooking Robots, They Want Assembly (w/ Rajat Bhageria, Chef Robotics)