Karakuri Joins Growing List of Closed Food Robot Startups
Some bad news on the food robot front.
Karakuri, a startup that makes a robotic food kiosk that mixes cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals, is shutting down, according to founder Barney Wragg.
In a LinkedIn post, Wragg cited the pandemic and a challenging fundraising environment as the reason for the news and included a link to a Google Sheet with Karakuri staff that Wragg said was “important” to him to help find new roles.
From the post:
It is with a heavy heart that I have to report that our Karakuri trip is coming to an end.
Over the past five years, we have developed and supplied robots to the QSR industry. We survived a lot of challenges, including the pandemic and our bank going to bully us, but sadly we couldn’t get the funding we needed to take it to the next level.
Most of all I would like to thank the amazing team we have built. They have always risen to the challenge and created amazing technology in the face of great uncertainty.
It is my responsibility to help these great people find new roles, spread their wings, and share their talents with others.
Attached is a list of available people and their preferred contact information.
Please feel free to reach out to anyone you think needs or can help find new roles.
I am also here to help in any way I can.
Thank you, Barney
Although it’s a bummer Karakuri couldn’t survive, it’s not surprising. Food robot startups suffer from many disadvantages, including very long development cycles and high capital costs.
Former Picnic CEO Clayton Wood summed it up well in a LinkedIn post where he explained that a self-catering startup “The danger is being successful enough at the seed stage and increasing momentum (and cost) towards your scale stage, only to not get Series A/B/C investors. Without planning and execution, you cannot survive. Progress means spending money–and cutting costs to stay alive kills progress.”
Clayton says he believes the new robots will benefit from early recognition that they need to be cost-effective from the get-go, unlike many first-generation food robots that were introduced during fundraising.
I also expect that more and more food robot startups will start looking to sell the product or subsystem quickly to get to the good money quickly. As I wrote a few months ago after our small meeting on food robots, investors like Buck Jordan see a way to make money by offering part of an inventor’s big idea to the market instead of waiting years until the full vision is realized.
“I suspect that some robotics companies that are less responsible, or more focused on money, will start to diversify their goals,” Jordan said.
Jordan pointed to Mdali, a maker of fully robotic restaurants, as an example of a company that he believes has key technology that can be ‘differentiated’ from the market and succeed.
Doing so required significant expertise. The creator did not sell part of his systems but tried to create a restaurant full of robots. The company was closed in March.
