AI-Enabled Robotics Solution Provider Chef Robotics Hire Ray Martino as Chief Operating Officer to Accelerate Robot Deployments

News provided by

Aug 23, 2023, 12:51 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 23, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- AI will have immense impact on our world as the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT has shown. However, the largest impact will be on the physical world industries like food, construction, agriculture, which represent 90%+ of global GDP.

Food service and production is the fourth most common job in the US. And yet, there's a crushing labor shortage with over 917,000 jobs unfilled. This is not expected to improve anytime soon with 3,100,000 unfilled jobs expected by 2023.

Chef Robotics is aiming to fill this gap. Chef builds AI-enabled robots to help food companies overcome the labor shortage and increase production volume with flexible automation. Chef's ultimate goal is to accelerate the advent of intelligent machines in the physical world to empower humans to do what humans do best.

To date, Chef Robotics has made over 1M+ meals in production. The company has robots in production at food companies in the US and plans to more than double the fleet of robots in production in 2023.

To help accelerate these deployments, Chef is announcing today the hiring of Ray Martino as Chief Operating Officer.

Most recently, Ray served as the COO and Co-Founder of Specific Diagnostics from 2013 until its acquisition by bioMerieux Inc. in 2022 for $425M. During his tenure, he led development, manufacturing, and operations, with responsibilities extending to marketing, customer engagements, fundraising, finance, and business development at different stages of the company's growth.

Before Specific, Ray was at Symbol Technologies, acquired by Motorola Solutions, and finally acquired by Zebra Technologies, here, he served in increasing positions from engineer to VP of Engineering to General Manager to SVP Marketing and finally CTO over 14 years. During his time at Symbol, the company grew from $20M to over $2B in annual revenue.

"I'm very excited for the unique opportunity to join Chef Robotics," said Mr. Martino. "The AI and robotics technology that Chef has created is impressive and the robotic system that Chef has developed provides us the opportunity to broadly meet a very clear market need around the world. Chef's current deployments position us well for commercial expansion. I am thrilled to be joining the Chef team and to be a part of the technological revolution now happening in AI and robotics."

Media Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Chef Robotics