Meet Posha, a countertop robot that cooks your meals for you

In 2017, Raghav Gupta got down to clear up a private downside: 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 company, builds countertop robots that make meals utilizing laptop imaginative and prescient. Customers scroll via a listing of recipes, choose the one they need, add the right quantities of the requested elements, and the machine makes the meal from there.

The method is designed to be customizable and forgiving, Gupta informed 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 whenever you wish to drink a cup of espresso, you select a brew of espresso in your espresso machine. You set beans, sugar, and milk in several containers. You faucet brew, and out comes a cup of espresso. Posha does one thing related, however for meals.”

A espresso machine is an efficient, however not excellent, 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 purchasing for elements and prepping every thing that goes into the system. Chopping, particularly, can take up a good quantity of a recipe’s cook dinner time.

Gupta agreed that some persons 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 probably the most success so far with prospects who prefer to cook dinner two to 6 occasions every week anyway, and want to lighten the load just a few of these evenings.

“These persons are already spending an hour within the kitchen each single day, deciding what to eat, purchasing for elements, cooking a meal, [and] cleansing up afterwards,” Gupta stated. “We assist them shave off at the least at the least 70% of this time, in order that they now find yourself spending solely about 10 to twenty minutes each single day.”

Posha, previously generally known as Nymble, initially began out as a robotic arm, Gupta stated, however the firm’s time in Bosch’s accelerator program prompted them to vary course. They realized customers didn’t need one thing that moved round their kitchen or that may be onerous to wash. The corporate has stored in shut contact with its early prospects ever since.

“We have now been tremendous targeted and tremendous obsessive about prospects from day one,” Gupta stated. “We don’t use Zendesk to talk with them, we’ve got WhatsApp conversations with over 100 of our prospects. Most prospects know me personally. I moved to the U.S. in the course 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 for the $1,750 direct-to-consumer countertop system. Posha not too long ago raised an $8 million Sequence A spherical led by Accel with participation from current traders 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. Particularly, the corporate needs so as to add extra recipe choices and the flexibility for folks to recommend recipe concepts and have generative AI flip these concepts into directions and add them into the system 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 take a look at your microwave, your dishwasher, your fridge, in some unspecified time in the future in time, these gadgets had been countertop gadgets,” Gupta stated. “They turned so indispensable over time in shopper properties that builders began putting in these gadgets in your properties. We really feel Posha may have the identical destiny very quickly.”