Chef Robotics Hires Somudro Gupta as Head of Software to Scale AI in the Physical World

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Jan 08, 2024, 08:15 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- AI will have an immense impact on our world as the rise of foundational models like ChatGPT has shown. However, its biggest impact will be in the physical world, given industries like manufacturing, food, and transportation 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 1,137,400 jobs unfilled.

Chef Robotics is filling this gap. Chef builds AI-enabled robots to help food companies overcome the labor shortage and increase production volume with Chef's robot solutions powered by ChefOS, Chef's AI brain. Chef's 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 Canada and plans to more than quadruple the fleet in 2024.

To help accelerate these deployments, today Chef is announcing the hiring of Somudro Gupta as Head of Software.

Most recently, Mr. Gupta was Head of Autonomous Vehicle Engineering at Embark Trucks, a publicly-traded company that was acquired by Applied Intuition in 2022. Over his five-year tenure, Mr. Gupta joined as the first software engineer where he built much of Embark's autonomy stack; he went on to lead the entire autonomy division at Embark, representing 45 software engineers.

Prior to Embark, Mr. Gupta was at Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory; he was the US Motion Planning Lead for Jack, a self-driving Audi A7 that drove 550 miles from the Bay Area to Las Vegas for CES 2015 (the longest demonstrated autonomous highway drive at the time).

"I'm thrilled to be joining Chef," said Mr. Gupta. "My career in autonomous driving taught me how to build and deploy intelligent robots in the real world. I believe the physical world is the next frontier for AI, and I'm excited to apply what I've learned (while combining my interests in food and robots) to a company like Chef to scale deployments at customer sites around the world. Chef has already proven itself with its early deployments, and now, given my background in AI, I'm looking forward to helping them scale the company to thousands of robots."

Media Contact: rajat@chefrobotics.ai

SOURCE Chef Robotics