Select a recipe and relax: Cooking takes the robotic route with Julia

The traditional method of only eating home-cooked meals changed nearly centuries ago. People have been shuffling between restaurants and their personal kitchens since then. Is it finally time for Artificial Intelligence to step in? Bengaluru-based start-up Nymble thinks so.

Founded in 2016 by Raghav Gupta and Rohin Malhotra, Nymble is a start-up that used machine learning to build an ecosystem where people can eat fresh home-cooked food suited to their taste preferences without spending a lot of time and effort in cooking. The company will use the funds for product development, innovation and intellectual property creation.

While it has so far been supported by the Karnataka government, it recently raised undisclosed Series-A funding from WaterBridge Ventures to build its product Julie — a cooking robot to prepare pot-meals automatically at the press of a button, unattended. These include curries, pasta, stir-fries, noodle or rice-based dishes.

“All one has to do is select a recipe, load in the necessary ingredients, tap cook, and sit back and relax while Julia cooks a delicious meal,” says co-founder Raghav Gupta.

The product has a multitude of sensors which can measure temperature, weight, consistency, and change in colour of the food, among others. These sensors also use inputs from the software to stir, heat and add ingredients at the right time and in the right quantity. The user can also customise the food according to a person’s personal taste and preferences — saltier, less oily, and so on.

Nymble intends to launch Julia by early 2020 at a price point somewhere between $600 and $1,000. The company is only targeting the United States right now and will enter India when it starts to “make more financial sense” for the Indian market to choose a robot over domestic help.

“There are not many dual-income households in India and one of the members is generally available to cook,” said Gupta.

To counter these challenges, until the Indian ecosystem matures, Nymble is setting up a small base in Shenzhen, China, to take advantage of the manufacturing ecosystem it offers.

Nymble is among kitchen IoT start-ups like Zimplistic Inventions, Rotimatic, and June Oven reaching out to working households in the US and the UK.

It is currently operating with a team of 18 engineers, roboticists and designers, in Bengaluru.

While currently in the prototype phase, the company plans to let customers order ingredients for them directly through the Julia platform.