Velocity Ventures, a leading Southeast Asian venture capital firm focused on helping the travel and hospitality industry solve challenges, will become an investor in Hyper Food Robotics (Hyper), an Israel-based company that will manufacture its first self-service kitchens. robotic pizza 2023.
In Hyper’s autonomous robotic kitchen, it takes 8 minutes to cook a pizza in the end-to-end process and the kitchen can produce up to 120 pizzas per hour. An unmanned kitchen can operate three times more efficiently than a human-operated kitchen by reducing labor and rental costs, as well as reducing food waste. Modular units are easy to transport ensuring light weight. Using AI technology, the robot kitchen is able to ensure consistency of food quality and safety levels.
Hyper is the brainchild of Udi Shamai, Yariv Reches and Harel Shafran. CEO Udi is a famous entrepreneur and owner of Pizza Hut Israel who has been managing fast food restaurants for over three decades. Faced with rising labor costs and challenges in hiring kitchen staff, Shamai decided to explore how tools and equipment could alleviate the chronic labor shortage problem. He decided to bring together a team of experts in the fields of food, robotics, and mechanics to design a fully autonomous store that could increase efficiency and reduce the reliance on human workers in the food service industry.
The goal is to design a robotic box kitchen for fast food restaurants that will replace the entire restaurant kitchen and automate the entire process from food preparation to cooking and even packing food delivery without No need for any employee participation. With autonomous kitchens, customers can truly operate off-site food services using a “plug and play” boxed kitchen, ensuring ease of scale while keeping production costs in check. Shamai is also committed to ensuring that quality assurance and food quality are not compromised.
Nicholas Cocks, CEO of Speedway Partnership said: “We are delighted to be investing in Future Restaurant Kitchen as we know that restaurants around the world are facing a staffing crisis. Our strategic plan at Velocity Venture is to identify and move startups that will solve problems faced by businesses in the hospitality and travel industries. The hyper-robotic kitchen will be tomorrow’s disruptive technology in the food service industry as unemployment challenges continue to grow as more people are now turning away from back-to-back jobs. Automation and robotics can help companies achieve lower labor costs and improve productivity by taking over repetitive tasks in the kitchen, allowing restaurants to redeploy their workers to other areas of the business. which will improve the customer experience.
Udi Shamai, CEO and founder of Hyper Food Robotics “Having Velocity Ventures come on board as our anchor investor is a big win for the Hyper team. We discussed the pilot store in October 2021 in Israel with Pizza Hut introducing the kitchen robotic that can prepare and cook pizzas and side dishes. We envision exciting times ahead as we grow and scale globally with the right partners. We aim to launch a ‘Hyper-Bootic box unit’ kitchen.”
Velocity Ventures is the most active investor in the travel and hospitality technology space in Southeast Asia and including Hyper, it has seven portfolio companies. The company also aims to make ten additional investments in the sector in Q4 2023.
Hyper Food Robotics (Hyper) is a leading innovator in autonomous fast food restaurants. As a solutions provider for food service operators, Hyper designs, builds, and operates fully autonomous robotic warehouses that can perform all fast food kitchen operations without the need for human staff. Hyper’s Robotics Box Kitchen is mounted on a 40-foot container and equipped with robotic solutions that are easily reconfigurable, ensuring lightness of weight and flexibility of movement. This groundbreaking concept will propel the foodservice industry toward a higher level of operational excellence as it seeks to help businesses quickly and easily deploy cloud kitchens. Hyper operates Robotics Box Kitchens as part of its end-to-end solutions, taking care of maintenance and monitoring.
The company’s leadership team are veteran managers working in the fields of food, robotics, and mechanics and CEO Udi Shamai is a well-known entrepreneur in the field of restaurant technology. Udi has 30 years of experience in managing fast food chains such as Dominos, Pizza Hut etc. (www.hyper-robotics.com)
Velocity Ventures is a Singapore-based venture capital firm with a particular focus on the Hospitality and Southeast Asian Industries. We invest in visionary innovators who want to reshape the Hospitality and Travel sector, with a focus on early-stage to growth-capable technology companies across 5 verticals: Travel Services, Transportation, Lodging, Food & Drinks, and experiences. (www.velocityventures.vc)