Keatz, considered one of a rising variety of so-called “cloud kitchens” — supply solely restaurant manufacturers working on the rails of Deliveroo and UberEats — has raised €12 million in new funding.
Backing the spherical are current traders Project A Ventures, Atlantic Labs, UStart, Ok Fund and JME Ventures, who’re joined by RTP Global. It provides to €7 million raised final May and can be utilized by the Berlin-based firm to additional increase its roll-out of cloud kitchens throughout Europe.
Launched in Spring 2016, Keatz now operates 10 cloud kitchens throughout Europe, having expanded past Berlin to Amsterdam, Madrid, Barcelona and Munich. The startup’s community of satellite tv for pc kitchens are designed to negate the excessive front-of-house prices present in standard eating places, whereas additionally promoting takeout meals that’s higher suited to supply.
“We believe the last unsolved part in food delivery is the preparation of food itself,” Keatz co-founder Paul Gebhardt tells TechCrunch. “Delivery food today is often compromised and sold by companies focusing on hospitality and not delivery food. Classic brick and mortar restaurants simply have a different business model, namely hospitality, which is all about the experience and location and the food is meant to be eaten immediately. Nobody at Nandos or Byron Burger designed the food keeping in mind that the food might travel on a Deliveroo bike for another 15 miles, mostly upside down in a delivery bag”.
Similar to different cloud kitchen startups, reminiscent of France’s Taster, Gebhardt says Keatz is altering this by focusing solely on meals “made for delivery,” together with designing dishes that may face up to a minimal 15 journey. The startup has a portfolio of eight delivery-only meals manufacturers, that are all ready in the identical shared kitchens.
“Our kitchens are usually between 100-200 square metres big and serve a delivery radius of 1-2 kilometres and we sell exclusively on existing delivery platforms, such as Deliveroo, UberEats, Glovo, JustEat, Delivery Hero, and TakeAway. Food arrives warm in nice sustainable packaging,” he says.
Meanwhile, though Gebhardt thinks the way forward for takeout meals will finally be drones delivering robot-cooked meals, he says autonomous kitchens are far more in attain than autonomous meals supply and already varieties a big a part of Keatz’s imaginative and prescient to construct “highly automated kitchens”.
“It is much easier for us to iteratively automate our kitchens compared to drone-delivery, which is a fairly binary technological transition,” he explains. “Our existing cloud kitchens today are already much more automated than traditional kitchens, from WiFi-connected convection ovens to a software supported food assembly process. At the end of the day high quality food preparation is an on-demand manufacturing problem: a customer orders a Burrito on UberEats and expects a warm meal 20 minutes later. This is quite a technological challenge we are trying to solve”.
To that finish, Keatz’s cloud kitchens could be regarded as akin to a “factory operator”. Rather than creating autonomous kitchen {hardware} of its personal, Gebhardt says the corporate is partnering with kitchen gear and automation firms in an analogous option to BMW partnering with firms to construct its automobile manufacturing vegetation.
“Despite our ambition to automate the kitchen, we are also very keen on being a great employer,” he provides, citing above market pay and complete coaching alternatives. Today, Keatz employs round 200 individuals throughout its 10 kitchens in Europe.
