In 2017, Raghav Gupta got down to resolve a private drawback: he needed 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 personal 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 via a listing of recipes, choose the one they need, add the correct quantities of the requested elements, and the machine makes the meal from there.
The method is designed to be customizable and forgiving, Gupta advised TechCrunch, so the machine permits folks to make substitutions, and Posha nonetheless works if a consumer doesn’t measure their elements completely.
“It’s like a espresso machine for meals,” Gupta stated. “So if you need to drink a cup of espresso, you select a brew of espresso in your espresso machine. You set beans, sugar, and milk in numerous containers. You faucet brew, and out comes a cup of espresso. Posha does one thing related, however for meals.”
A espresso machine is an effective, however not good, 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, customers nonetheless play an lively position in searching for elements and prepping all the pieces that goes into the machine. Chopping, particularly, can take up a good quantity of a recipe’s prepare 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 this point with prospects who wish to prepare dinner two to 6 occasions per week anyway, and need to lighten the load just a few 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 elements, 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, so that they now find yourself spending solely about 10 to twenty minutes each single day.”
Posha, previously often called 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 customers didn’t need one thing that moved round their kitchen or that will be laborious to wash. The corporate has saved in shut contact with its early prospects ever since.
“Now we have been tremendous centered and tremendous obsessive about prospects from day one,” Gupta stated. “We don’t use Zendesk to talk with them, now we have WhatsApp conversations with over 100 of our prospects. Most prospects know me personally. I moved to the U.S. in the midst of the pandemic, simply to be near my prospects.” That system can’t scale, however clearly works for Posha for now.
Gupta stated that, to date, Posha has primarily relied on word-of-mouth advertising and marketing for the $1,750 direct-to-consumer countertop machine. Posha lately raised an $8 million Sequence A spherical led by Accel with participation from current buyers 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. Specifically, the corporate needs so as to add extra recipe choices and the power for folks to counsel recipe concepts and have generative AI flip these concepts into directions and add them into the machine rapidly.
The corporate launched its Posha robots in January 2025, and has since bought out of its first batch — and is taking pre-orders for its second.
“If you happen to have a look at your microwave, your dishwasher, your fridge, sooner or later in time, these units have been countertop units,” Gupta stated. “They turned so indispensable over time in shopper properties that builders began putting in these units in your properties. We really feel Posha may have the identical destiny very quickly.”
