11 years ago, every morning, Pranoti Nagarkar had to wrestle in the kitchen to prepare an Indian breakfast. To make one part of the main dish, Roti, a really popular flatbread used in daily meal in India as well as Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Bangladesh or Indian families around the world, it took Pranoti 45 minutes. A decent home-cooked meal takes too much effort for the newly-married Indian couple in Singapore, as they sure are busy with other jobs to start a new day.
This is not Pranoti’s own problem, but many other Indian housewives around the globe are also facing. Every day it took them hours to mix, knead, flatten and eventually grill roti, not to mention that the flatbread would still be imperfect if processing was inaccurate and skilled.
“Necessity is the mother of invention”. With a mechanical engineering background, Pranoti Nagarkar and her husband studied technological solutions to this problem and created Rotimatic – a bakery “robot” for sliced bread.
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You may wonder how the bakery robot works. Well, Rotimatic uses AI and IoT technology to observe and self-learn how to measure the raw material input such as oil, flour and water, then performs the tasks of mixing, kneading, flattening, baking to produce a Roti. The robot can complete the process within a minute, customize to your taste with the choice of oil quantity and baking level.
“We want to let the robot replace housewives’ kitchen work, making preparing meals simple and time-saving. Almost every culture has its own version of flat bread like rotis, tortillas or pitas. Therefore, Rotimatic can completely develop in the global market”, Israni confidently shared.
Within a week of its launch, the Rotimatic product introduction video has spread on YouTube, attracting more than 2.5 million views and converting to sales of $ 5 million. Rotimatic currently sells in the market for $ 1,000 a machine.
Pranoti Nagarkar graduated from NUS mechanical engineering, founded a company called Zimplistic and received 8 patents, including robot vacuum cleaner project. With her inventions, she brought Zimplistic to win the first place in a startup program in Singapore in 2009. In 2011, her husband, Rishi lsrani joined the company as CEO. Prior to that, he was the founder and CTO of another start-up called TenCube.
In 2017, Zimplistic announced revenue of 20 million USD in the first year of sales. With the support of NUS Enterprise, the company successfully mobilized US $ 3 million within Series A from a number of private investors, followed by US $ 11.5 million Series B from NSI Ventures and venture capital fund. Robert Bosch. In 2018, the company mobilized US $ 30 million in the C series call fund by EDBI and Credence Partners, bringing the total funding to 48.5 million USD.
Rishi sees the success of the series C round of fundamentals creating a foundation for the company to step into the big game with exciting opportunities ahead. Zimplistic is considering expanding the market and producing other kinds of cakes like tortillas, wrap bread, gluten-free bread …
By May 2018, the company has successfully sold 40,000 Rotimatic and collects 40 million USD. It is expected that in 2019, sales will reach 50,000 units in 20 countries, revenue will increase to 50 million USD.
Find more about the company on their website: https://rotimatic.com/
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