French startup Cala Announces €5.5M Seed Round
by Startacus Admin
Cala's mission to innovate the catering sector continues as it secures funding boost to support expansion of its fully autonomous restaurant chain
Exciting times ahead in the catering sector with the news that Cala, a company using advanced robotics to make high-quality meals accessible to everybody, has secured a €5.5M Seed investment.
Cala was founded in 2017 by engineering students whose own experiences in trying to find quality and convenient food on a student budget, led to them building the world’s first fully robotic pasta restaurant. Their pasta-making robot can autonomously cook affordable, nutritious, sustainable and delicious meals, and thereby transform the cost and experience of fast-casual dining.
Ylan Richard, Co-founder and CEO of Cala,explains, “As students we were frustrated by the cost and lack of healthy meals available to us. Through our research, and driven by our own stomachs, we could see that the food service industry is broken. In fast food, the low-profit margin means that it's impossible to use higher quality ingredients. We realised that if you could automate the meal preparation, you could rapidly increase the number of meals being produced and improve the economics. We decided to focus on pasta as it can be customised and we could also reduce the number of meals that include meat, offering customers delicious food that is more sustainable, healthy and affordable. We’ve been building and iterating on our robot and our autonomous kitchen can now make 400 pasta dishes in one hour.”
The investment, led by BACKED VC and joined by Possible Ventures, Kima Ventures, Quiet Ventures and Acequia Capital will enable Cala to expand its fully autonomous restaurant chain in France, explore new locations in Europe and increase its operational teams.
Technology + food - what could be better!
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Published on: 6th October 2021
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