Somerville-based Dexai Robotics, an AI robotics company that's working on commercial kitchen automation, raised $5.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Hyperplane Venture Capital and featured participation from new investors Rho Capital, Harlem Capital, Contour Venture Partners and NextView Ventures.
As part of the funding round, Hyperplane's managing partner Vivjan Myrto joined Dexai's board of directors.
Dexai Robotics develops Alfred, a collaborative robot or ‘cobot’ trained as a sous-chef to assist in restaurant kitchens. Alfred’s specialty is working with deformable materials, the ones that change form as you interact with them, such as ice cream, sushi-grade tuna or pico de gallo. The robot is trained to assemble food using utensils like ladles, tongs, spoons and dishes.
The startup will use the funding to expand its engineering, sales, and product teams, and take its product to market.
"And now the fun begins," said Anthony Tayoun, Dexai’s CFO and Co-founder. "We're excited to cross this step and this external validation was important to get. Next, we take our product to market."
Dexai Robotics was born out of a research collaboration in artificial intelligence for robotics among researchers at The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, MIT, and Harvard in 2018. The groundwork for the company was laid down by David Johnson, Dexai’s CEO and Co-founder, who worked at Draper for seven years and Tayoun, who was getting an MBA at Harvard Business School at the time.
The pair was struck by the labor gap in the restaurant industry and the need for service line "cooks" doing repetitive manual tasks in the kitchen.
In an interview with BostInno in 2018, Tayoun argued that even with robotic precision and speed, using Alfred would be about three times cheaper for 30-40 percent increased productivity.
For reference, four Alfreds can assemble about 200 bowls in an hour.
In the same interview, Tayoun said that the duo was still toying with different business models, but one that’s on the table is an output-based payment where Alfred gets paid for the number of bowls he makes. “It’s a competitive way to encourage restaurants to adopt automation – they pay for what they use,” Johnson told BostInno in 2018. “The model turns assembly cost into a variable cost.”
The startup's current headcount is at 11 full-time members, with plans to double the team by year-end. Specifically, the company is hiring software engineers and machine learning specialists.
As for Alfred, the sous-chef is currently acquiring more skills like dispensing sauces or handling simple kitchen gadgets like a cooker.
At its lab space at Greentown Labs, the company is currently training kitchen staff to work with and supervise Alfred in a makeshift kitchen.
"You can expect customer-facing partnerships this year," Tayoun said. "Stay tuned."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOYUq3BuxA&feature=emb_title
