iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
Chef Robotics has hired an Indian American professional to tap into artificial intelligence (AI). The San Francisco-based firm builds AI-enabled robots to help food companies overcome the labor shortage in the food industry and increase production volume with robot solutions powered by ChefOS, Chef Robotic’s AI brain.
Chef Robotics has appointed Somudro Gupta as its head of software to advance the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the food industry. The firm hopes to tackle the labor shortage in the food industry. The food service and production industry generates the fourth most common jobs in the US and yet, it suffers from a crushing labor shortage with over 1,137,400 jobs unfilled.
The firm aims to fill this gap by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines and empowering humans. To date, Chef Robotics has made over 1 million meals in production and has robots in production at food companies in the US and Canada, and plans to more than quadruple the fleet in 2024. Gupta has been hired as the company’s head of software to accelerate these deployments.
Before joining Chef Robotics, Gupta was Head of Autonomous Vehicle Engineering at Embark Trucks, a publicly traded company that was acquired by Applied Intuition in 2022. Over his five-year tenure at Embark, Gupta joined as the first software engineer where he built much of its autonomy stack. Later, he also led the entire autonomy division at Embark, representing 45 software engineers. Before Embark, Gupta was at Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory; he was the US Motion Planning Lead for Jack, a self-driving Audi A7 that drove 550 miles from the Bay Area to Las Vegas for CES 2015 (the longest demonstrated autonomous highway drive at the time).
“I’m thrilled to be joining Chef,” said Mr. Gupta. “My career in autonomous driving taught me how to build and deploy intelligent robots in the real world. I believe the physical world is the next frontier for AI, and I’m excited to apply what I’ve learned (while combining my interests in food and robots) to a company like Chef to scale deployments at customer sites around the world. Chef has already proven itself with its early deployments, and now, given my background in AI, I’m looking forward to helping them scale the company to thousands of robots.”
