In 2017, Raghav Gupta got down to clear up a private drawback: he wished easy accessibility to the home-cooked meals he grew up consuming with out having to spend time cooking or spend cash on takeout or hiring a non-public chef. He turned to robotics, which led him to discovered the startup Posha.
Posha, a former TechCrunch Startup Battlefield firm, builds countertop robots that make meals utilizing pc imaginative and prescient. Customers scroll by means of a listing of recipes, choose the one they need, add the right quantities of the requested substances, and the machine makes the meal from there.
The method is designed to be customizable and forgiving, Gupta instructed TechCrunch, so the machine permits folks to make substitutions, and Posha nonetheless works if a consumer doesn’t measure their substances completely.
“It’s like a espresso machine for meals,” Gupta stated. “So once you wish to drink a cup of espresso, you select a brew of espresso in your espresso machine. You place beans, sugar, and milk in several containers. You faucet brew, and out comes a cup of espresso. Posha does one thing related, however for meals.”
A espresso machine is an efficient, however not excellent, comparability to Posha, as Posha requires a bit extra labor than a espresso maker.
Whereas Posha does a considerable quantity of the work by cooking these meals, shoppers nonetheless play an lively position in searching for substances and prepping every thing that goes into the gadget. Chopping, particularly, can take up a good quantity of a recipe’s cook dinner time.
Gupta agreed that some individuals are simply not going to go for an answer that also requires them to do a few of the cooking. He stated that Posha has discovered essentially the most success to date with clients who prefer to cook dinner two to 6 instances every week anyway, and want to lighten the load a couple of of these evenings.
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“These individuals are already spending an hour within the kitchen each single day, deciding what to eat, searching for substances, cooking a meal, [and] cleansing up afterwards,” Gupta stated. “We assist them shave off at the very least at the very least 70% of this time, in order that they now find yourself spending solely about 10 to twenty minutes each single day.”
Posha, previously referred to as Nymble, initially began out as a robotic arm, Gupta stated, however the firm’s time in Bosch’s accelerator program prompted them to alter course. They realized shoppers didn’t need one thing that moved round their kitchen or that may be exhausting to wash. The corporate has saved in shut contact with its early clients ever since.
“We now have been tremendous targeted and tremendous obsessive about clients from day one,” Gupta stated. “We don’t use Zendesk to talk with them, we’ve got WhatsApp conversations with over 100 of our clients. Most clients know me personally. I moved to the U.S. in the midst of the pandemic, simply to be near my clients.” That system can’t scale, however clearly works for Posha for now.
Gupta stated that, to this point, Posha has primarily relied on word-of-mouth advertising for the $1,750 direct-to-consumer countertop gadget. Posha lately raised an $8 million Sequence A spherical led by Accel with participation from present traders together with Xeed Ventures, Waterbridge Ventures, and Binny Bansal, the co-founder of Flipkart, amongst others.
Gupta stated that Posha will use the funding to proceed to develop the product. Particularly, the corporate desires so as to add extra recipe choices and the flexibility for folks to counsel recipe concepts and have generative AI flip these concepts into directions and add them into the gadget rapidly.
The corporate launched its Posha robots in January 2025, and has since offered out of its first batch — and is taking pre-orders for its second.
“When you take a look at your microwave, your dishwasher, your fridge, in some unspecified time in the future in time, these units had been countertop units,” Gupta stated. “They grew to become so indispensable over time in shopper properties that builders began putting in these units in your properties. We really feel Posha could have the identical destiny very quickly.”