July 6, 2018

Seattle-based Otto Robotics has raised $4.9 million through a funding round led by Vulcan Capital, and including 18 additional unnamed investors. With the fresh funding comes a new name for the company – Vivid Robotics – which will now focus its technologies on food.

“We’re going to be creating products for food, and we’re also going to be creating other things,” Garett Ochs, co-founder of Vivid Robotics, told GeekWire. “We wanted to do rebranding so we are set up for a more streamlined approach to a divergent future.”

This funding follows a previous round in January 2017 which garnered the startup $1.5 million from Draper Associates and Vulcan Capital, the investment arm of Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen.

At the time the company stated that it was a robotics company producing low-cost modular systems built to assemble, cook, or deliver food, and Ochs told Geek Wire that this latest funding round will get the company “ready for prime time”.

“The analogy that I like to use is, Henry Ford invented the assembly line, and Toyota perfected it,” said Ochs. “McDonald’s invented the quick-service restaurant, and we’d like to perfect it. … We would like to be the Toyota of this technology.”

A Glimpse of the Future

A clean work environment and reduction of foodborne illnesses are two drivers that are expected to result in the market for robotics in the food and beverage industries seeing a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29 percent between 2015 and 2019, according to Technavio, while Markets and Markets expects the market to carry a value of $2.5 billion by 2022, reports Robotics Business Review.

Advances in automated food preparation have also seen robotics, which up until recently has been largely confined to the upstream portion of the ag value chain, start to make inroads farther downstream.

Basic automated technology, such as self-service ordering and robotic servers is already making inroads, according to a  McKinsey Global Institute report released last year. Jobs that involve “predictable physical activities” — such as cooking or serving food, cleaning kitchens, collecting dirty dishes, and preparing beverages — will be the first to be automated. The report said that “73 percent of the activities workers perform in food service and accommodations have the potential for automation, based on technical considerations.”

Just last month, Chowbotics, another new robotics food company in the food space, raised $11 million in a Series A-1 round led by the Foundry Neighborhood and Techstars. Techstars participated in the company’s seed and Series A rounds as well.

Giving us a glimpse at what the future of food could look like, Chowbotics initial product named “Sally” is a robot that serves customizable, made-to-order salads. Via a touchscreen user interface, Sally makes salads in approximately one minute with any combination of up to 22 ingredients. The robot offers more than 10,000 custom salad options. Users can fine-tune the calorie total by adding or subtracting ingredients.

-Lynda Kiernan