Velocity Ventures invests in automated Pizza store

With Hyper’s autonomous robotic kitchens, it takes 8 mins to cook a pizza for 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 as compared to a human-staffed kitchen by reducing overheads for labour and rental costs, and also minimising food waste. The modular units are easy to transport ensuring ease of scalability. Using AI technology, the robotic kitchen is able to ensure consistency in food quality and safety standards.

Hyper is the brainchild of Udi Shamai, Yariv Reches and Harel Shafran. CEO Udi is a well-known entrepreneur and owner of Pizza Hut Israel with over thirty years of managing fast food restaurants. Faced with rising labour costs and challenges to recruit kitchen crew, Shamai decided to explore how robotics and automation could alleviate the persistent problems of manpower shortage. He decided to bring together a team of experts in the fields of food, robotics, and mechanics to design a fully autonomous store that can increase efficiency and reduce reliance on a human workforce in the food services industry.

The goal is to design a self-contained total solutions robotic box kitchen for fast food restaurants which will replace an entire restaurant kitchen and automate the entire process from food preparation to cooking and even packing the food for delivery without the need for any kitchen crew to be involved. With modular autonomous kitchens, clients can essentially operate off-premises food services using a “plug and play” boxed kitchen, ensuring ease of scalability while maintaining manufacturing costs are kept economical. Shamai is also committed to ensure that quality assurance and food quality is not compromised.

Nicholas Cocks, Managing Partner of Velocity Ventures said: “We are excited to be investing in the Future Restaurant Kitchen as we know that restaurants all around the world are facing a manpower crisis. Our strategic roadmap at Velocity Venture is to identify and propel startups that will solve problems faced by businesses in the hospitality and travel industry. Hyper’s robotic kitchen will be tomorrow’s disruptive technology for the food services industry as labour shortage challenges escalate because more people now shun back-of-house operations jobs. Automation and robotics can help companies achieve lower labour costs and improve productivity by taking over repetitive tasks in the kitchen, allowing restaurants to redeploy their employees to other parts of the business that will improve the customer experience.”

Udi Shamai , CEO and Co-founder of Hyper Food Robotics “Having Velocity Ventures come onboard as our anchor investor is a major milestone for the team at Hyper. We debuted our pilot store in October 2021 in Israel with Pizza Hut introducing a robotic kitchen 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 Hyper “robotic box kitchens” internationally by next year which will be a gamechanger for any food services operator wanting to deploy a cloud kitchen in which all automated technology and production zones are packed within a self-cleaning shipping-container-like unit.”

Velocity Ventures is the most proactive investor in the travel and hospitality tech space in Southeast Asia and including Hyper, has seven portfolio companies. The firm also aims to make ten additional investments in the sector by Q4 2023.