Promus Ventures
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Chef Robotics raises $7.7M to help automate kitchens
A year and a half’s worth of global pandemic has had a profound impact on virtually every sector of the workforce. When it comes to future automation, food prep isn’t quite at the top of the list (that distinction likely goes to warehouse fulfillment, for the time being), but it’s certainly up there. And it’s easy to see why the events of 2020 and beyond have left many kitchens looking for alternative sources of labor.
San Francisco-based Chef Robotics today announced that it has raised a combined $7.7 million pre-seed and seed round, with the goal of helping automate certain aspects of food preparation. The list of investors is pretty long on this one (with seed and pre-seed rolled up into one), including Kleiner Perkins, Promus Ventures, Construct, Bloomberg Beta, BOLD Capital Partners, Red and Blue Ventures, Gaingels, Schox VC, Stewart Alsop and Tau Ventures, among others.
The product team includes ex-employees of Cruise, Google, Verb Surgical, Zoox and Strateos. Chef’s team isn’t quite ready to show off its robot just yet (hence generic kitchen stock photo #8952 up top) — not entirely unusual for a robotics company still in the early stages. What it has outlined, thus far, is a robotics and vision system destined to increase production volume and enhance consistency, while removing some food waste from the process. Fast casual restaurants appear to be a key focus for this sort of tech.
The company describes it thusly:
Chef is designed to mimic the flexibility of humans, allowing customers to handle thousands of different kinds of food using minimal hardware changes. Chef does this using artificial intelligence that can learn how to handle more and more ingredients over time and that also improves. This allows customers to do things like change their menu often. Additionally, Chef’s modular architecture allows customers to quickly scale up just as they would by hiring more staff (but unlike humans, Chef always shows up on time and doesn’t need breaks).
More details on the underlying tech soon, no doubt.
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Gwyneth Paltrow invests in The Expert, a video marketplace for high-end interior designers
The pandemic-induced lockdowns halted many a home decoration project, but the irony was that our homes became even more important. But where to get ideas to decorate? Home décor experts could no longer visit. Now an LA-based startup is addressing this digitization of the interior design market, but kicking off with a typically LA-oriented, high-end clientele.
The LA-based The Expert — a platform for video consultations with interior designers — has raised a $3 million seed funding round led by Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Sweet Capital, Promus Ventures, Golden Ventures, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, AD 100 designer Brigette Romanek and CEO/founder of goop, Gwyneth Paltrow.
The Expert offers 1:1 video consultations with leading interior designers, it says.
The founders consist of Jake Arnold, a celebrity interior designer (who has worked with John Legend and Rashida Jones and Chrissy Teigen, among others) and YC-alumni, Leo Seigal, who previously founded and sold Represent.com to CustomInk for $100 million in 2015.
After being “inundated” with DMs during lockdown asking for his advice, Arnold says he realized he didn’t have the business model to help non-retainer clients. So he joined Seigal to create The Expert.
The Expert features 85 designers, so far. Clients click on designers’ profiles to see rates and availability, then click to book. Clients can upload any relevant floor plans, images of the home, inspiration ideas, etc. for the designer to review ahead of time. They then join a Zoom link (the platform uses the Zoom API) to meet with an interior designer, and can leave a review afterward.
The company claims it has 700 designers on its waitlist and will hit $1 million of bookings after its first quarter, after launching in early February this year.
The startup has some competition in the form of Modsy and Havenly, but The Expert says it is going for a more high-end experience, where clients are willing to pay $300-$2,500 for an hour of a designers’ time. The startup takes a 20% cut of the transaction.
Co-founder Leo Seigal said: “We were able to attract a crazy roster of designers partly thanks to co-founder Jake who is so highly regarded in the industry, and partly due to a timeliness of offering which is far above anything that has been tried in the home space.”
In a statement, Gwyneth Paltrow said: “I’ve always felt that access to great design – and those who create it – is too rare of a commodity. It’s a game-changer for someone without the budget for a full-time designer to have this roster of talent on speed dial.”
Nicole Johnson, partner at Forerunner, said: “We’ve been thinking through new models for the interior design sector for years at Forerunner, observing room for improvement for the trade and consumers alike. Interior design is arguably the ultimate, best-suited source of home inspiration and commerce enablement for consumers, but the trade is a famously walled garden. The Expert solves for this, connecting anyone, anywhere with the world’s leading interior designers via video consultation—allowing Experts to broaden their reach and monetization in a predictable, rewarding, and low-friction way.”
Pippa Lamb, partner at Sweet Capital, which led their pre-seed investment round last summer said: “The Expert is democratizing access to top creators in the $150B global interior design industry. By partnering with leading talents like Amber Lewis and Leanne Ford, it’s solving both upstream discovery and downstream services: bringing Instagram feeds to life. Leo and his team are visionaries and Sweet Capital has been proud to back them since Day 1.”
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3 VCs discuss space junk and what else they’re betting on right now
Space may be the final frontier, but in terms of investment, VCs are just getting started. With that in mind during TC Sessions: Space 2020 last week, we spoke to three investors who’ve been actively funding what could become tomorrow’s biggest companies to learn where they might focus next.
Sustainability is a major issue for all of their portfolio companies.
Our guests — Tess Hatch of Bessemer Venture Partners, who has long focused on the commercialization of space; Mike Collett of Promus Ventures, a venture firm that invests in deep tech software and hardware companies; and Chris Boshuizen of the venture firm DCVC and a cofounder of Planet Labs — had a lot of intriguing observations on topics, including the dangers of orbital debris, the merits of space manufacturing, and how they’d rate the U.S. government when it comes to fostering space-related innovations.
For those who missed the event, we’ve posted a video of our conversation below.
Space junk could affect long-term sustainability
Hatch, who recently co-authored an informative piece on the topic, said there’s little consensus about whether space junk is a critical matter that deserves more regulatory attention or an issue that will resolve itself through tech advancements, even while startups like Astroscale and D-Orbit are focused on the issue. The commercial industry’s expectation seems to be that space companies can regulate themselves and launch constellations without leaving pieces of launch vehicles or rocket stages in space, she said.
For her part, Hatch said it’s something to potentially invest in within a “handful of years.” At the moment, she added, “it’s not at the top of my list just due to looking for a shorter return on my investment for my LPs in the fund.”
Collett and the others stressed that in the meantime, sustainability is a major issue for all of their portfolio companies. “Everybody wants to do their job as a corporate citizen to make sure they’re not leaving anything else up there that doesn’t need to be there. Indeed, Boshuizen noted that at Planet Labs, best practices were taken very seriously.
Still, Boshuizen noted concerns about newer capital sources that might be less focused on the issue of space debris. “I don’t think everyone necessarily has the same space background,” he said, explaining that “we’re seeing a lot of outside investment from new people joining the industry, which is exciting, but also they don’t really know how important this is [and] it’s important for people to realize that they’ve got to pay attention to this.”
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