Shark Tank Featured Company, upliance.ai Raises Rs 34 Cr
upliance.ai, India’s first AI powered home appliance company has raised a seed round at ₹34 crores at a valuation of ₹143 crores. The round is led by Khosla Ventures, who have invested in multiple AI-focused startups like OpenAI, Rabbit and Sarvam.
Khosla Ventures has been investing in bold, impactful and early innovative startups for over 20 years. Their portfolio comprises some of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories including Doordash, Block, Instacart, Gitlab and Stripe. Khosla Ventures was the first venture fund investor in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. With over $15 billion of assets under management, the fund invests across a range of sectors including AI, sustainability, enterprise, consumer, health and frontier technologies.
The first product dubbed ‘upliance’, comes preloaded with 500+ guided recipes on an 8 inch touchscreen. The meals are cooked nearly hands-free in a Smart Jar. The Smart Jar includes a blade, a thermal sensor and a heating element, and can perform over 16 cooking tasks including chopping, sautéing, blending, heating and steaming.With their flagship AI Cooking Assistant the hardware startup aims to free up the nearly 700 hours* in a year that Indians spend cooking in the kitchen.
upliance uses a proprietary technology called UpAI. This technology is built to understand the details of cooking - everything from getting ingredients ready to making complete meals. It's designed so anyone, no matter their experience in the kitchen, can easily cook what they want. UpAI has been used in thousands of kitchens and has learnt from every single meal cooked. It can carry out cooking functions autonomously and gets it right, so users can cook new and varied meals with the same effort as making Maggi.
UpAI removes the difficulties associated with daily cooking, ranging from tadka to sous vide. "Using the upliance feels like talking to a chef who wants to learn from you and cook to your taste." explains Mohit Sharma, co-founder & CTO.
With this round of funding, upliance.ai aims to grow its revenue to ₹150 crores in 2024 and to scale production to 20,000 units per annum in the next 6 months. The company launched their first appliance in 2023, an AI Cooking Assistant which integrates both machine learning and AI to automate cooking tasks like chopping ingredients, automated stirring and mixing and heating. upliance.ai’s unprecedented growth has been led by positive word of mouth from the nearly 1000 owners. 60% of the orders in 2023 were direct referrals and the remaining sales were driven by organic marketing.
Quote by Mahek Mody, co-founder & CEO “We are extremely excited about having Khosla Ventures as partners. Their investment is a validation of both the potential of upliance.ai and the traction we have seen in the market. The Indian Government has been working extensively to support deep tech and hardware startups and we are proud to be a part of this nascent sunrise sector in India. We believe that upliance.ai can level Up young Indian homes and make a difference in a meaningful way to daily lives.
Rajesh Swaminathan, Partner at Khosla Ventures added, “At Khosla Ventures, we invest early in bold and impactful ideas. Mahek and his team have built a product that early consumers love and has the potential to significantly change people’s daily eating routines. We are also excited about the health benefits and AI integration capabilities possible with upliance.ai. These are the bold bets we like to take.”
upliance.ai closed its pre-seed round of ₹11 crores in 2023, receiving investments from Draper Associates, Rukam Capital, Rainmatter (a Zerodha Fund), and angel investors including the co-founders of Ather Energy and Unacademy. They have also been first runners up on Qualcomm’s Design in India Challenge in 2023.