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Warehouses aren’t the only places grappling with a labor crunch. Since the start of the pandemic, restaurants around the world have been grappling with staffing shortages. A number of startups have entered the picture with automation solutions, aimed at reducing 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 probably the most prominent due, in part, to the novelty of having a robot arm flipping burgers.
Botinkit’s — short for “(ro)Bot in Kit(chen)” — Omni lacks that level of physical flash, instead relying on a more standard kitchen appliance form factor. That is to say, it’s a robot that doesn’t expressly look like a robot. Its looks more like a self-service kiosk, down to the inclusion of a touchscreen. The system is kitchen safe, of course, and designed to be operated by a small staff of humans.
The Omni system can cook, stir-fry, and stew — essentially anything you can cook in a wok, the robot should be able to handle with minimal human intervention. The Shenzhen-based startup says use of an Omni system can effectively halve the human labor requirements in the kitchen.
“When I’m thinking about what the kitchen will look like in 10 years, I’m thinking it should not be the traditional way we see today,” CEO Shirley Chen told TechCrunch. “So we decided to start from the hardest parts, the chef’s parts. When you use chefs, it’s very difficult to control the consistency, because everything is based on human feeling.”
When Chen co-founded Botinkit in 2021, she was both a strategist at British accounting giant KPMG and a restaurant owner. She says the unusual combination of roles put her in a good position to recognize the challenges facing restaurants.
Investors are listening. The company announced a $13 million Series A in July 2023. Through a Series A extension, that number is now $21 million.
Asia continues to be Botinkit’s largest market, but the startup has since expanded into Europe and the U.S. This new funding will go toward expanding the company’s international reach.
Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Juniper.
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