Food robotics company Mukunda raises $8 mn in round led by Zomato

Food robotics company Mukunda Foods has raised $8 million in a funding round led by Zomato, taking the company's post-money valuation to $30 million. Zomato invested $5 million as part of the funding round.

The company had previously raised funds from Ncubate Capital, Singapore Angel Network, and Indian Angel Network. The company plans to utilise funds to expand its reach across QSRs, cloud kitchens and the fine dine segment. The company also plans to use a part of the raised capital to introduce services to help the F&B businesses scale.

Mukunda said its products enable restaurants to scale rapidly while maintaining consistency in food quality and customer experience across multiple outlets. It also helps restaurants become more efficient by reducing manpower costs, wastage and increasing kitchen throughput

Eshwar K. Vikas, CEO, and Co-Founder, Mukunda Foods, said: "Zomato and Mukunda Foods share the vision of reaching every restaurant and helping them grow. While Zomato does it by helping restaurants reach more customers and increasing their revenues, we help the F&B brands increase their profitability and grow fast with our kitchen technologies.”

Zomato’s investment in Mukunda has come amid the food delivery’s announcement to launch a 10-minute delivery service. The company said earlier this week that the plan will be accomplished by using in-kitchen robotics at hyperlocal kitchens where food will be packaged within 10-minutes. 

As a part of the service, experts said that restaurants will be required to dispatch a certain number of pre-cooked or half-cooked food to the Zomato stations. However, Business Standard reported earlier that several restaurants are averse to the idea as they fear that participating in the programme might hurt their quality control and brand value.

Meanwhile, there has been an uproar against the quick commerce model itself as gig workers might be put at risk due to the pressure of making faster deliveries. Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal has tried to assuage such concerns, saying that delivery workers would not be incentivised or penalised on the basis of their delivery speed. 

The company has said that the quick commerce set up would require delivery executives to travel at the same average speed of 20 kilometres per hour as they do now – as the distances between the delivery hubs and customer doorsteps will be minimised to 1-2 kilometres.