upliance.ai, India’s AI-powered home appliance company that featured on Shark Tank India, recently secured a ₹34 crore seed round at a valuation of ₹143 crore. The funding was led by Khosla Ventures, renowned for investing in AI startups like OpenAI, Rabbit, and Sarvam.

upliance.ai’s AI Cooking Assistant comes in the form of a jar with a smart 8-inch screen attached. It can prepare over 500+ dishes, including paneer stir fry, chole masala, steamed rice, and chai, for instance. “We are actually working closely with OpenAI, and it’s not just about the APIs. We have also started using our own trained models, so it’s not as simple as ChatGPT,” said Mahek Mody, upliance.ai chief, in an exclusive interview with AIM.

“We want to build Netflix, but for food,” he added, saying that upliance offers you an infinite variety of food options. “You don’t need to worry about whether you know how to cook something or not, you could just follow instructions,” he said. 

Tech Behind upliance.ai

The company uses a proprietary technology called Up⤴️AI, built to understand the details of cooking – right from getting ingredients ready to making complete meals. 

The smart jar is equipped with a blade, a thermal sensor, and a heating element, enabling it to execute more than 16 cooking functions such as chopping, sautéing, blending, heating, and steaming. “The jar looks at vibrations and the viscosity of the gravy. All these things help it determine how far ahead we are in the cooking process and if it is consistently cooked,” said Mody.

The screen comes with the in-built ‘ChefGPT’, which answers all your queries about the recipes and suggests ingredients for the dish. Moreover, it can suggest new recipes based on the ingredients you have at your disposal. Not only does it provide step-by-step instructions while you are cooking, but also enhances your overall cooking experience.

“We have now 25,000 meals cooked for customers on both the app and the device. For instance, we have approximately 420 unique recipes that people have cooked and we have cross-promoted food as well,” said Mody, adding that they started with 50 customers who pre-ordered the product. 

Why LLMs in the Kitchen?

“The idea is that if one person cooks a dish in one corner of the world, another person should also be able to cook the same thing and all its variations,” said Mody. 

He further added that all the cooking data, people’s preferences, and feedback are streamed to the internet to maintain collective intelligence and improve their cooking algorithms. 

“Typically, you learn cooking from your parents. It’s mostly roti-sabzi, and dal–chawal. But suppose you want to make risotto, it would take awfully long to learn that from YouTube,” he said. Now, you can input the name of the dish into the generative AI screen that upliance has and it will generate a recipe for you.

“For example, let’s say lasooni chicken is not on the appliance and is not pre-set, you can still go to the AI generator and type the name of the dish. It will generate the recipe for you,” he added.

Furthermore, he said that the AI Cooking Assistant will consider the type of recipe and the temperature of the item before providing answers. “You could be in the middle of cooking and say, ‘Hey, I want to make this recipe vegan’. It will go ahead and make the changes in the recipe accordingly,” he explained. 

upliance.ai may introduce new products in the future but for now, one can buy the AI Cooking Assistant from the company website for ₹23,999. In our kitchens, we have several appliances like the microwave, induction cooker, mixer, coffee maker, etc., LLMs can help us use these devices more effectively, eliminating the need to manually press buttons to adjust settings as they would be smart enough to do so.

upliance.ai’s Journey 

upliance.ai was launched in early 2023 by Mahek Mody and Mohit Sharma. Mody has previously worked with Ather, learning how to set up the supply chain and design production, while Sharma was at Chaayos, lapping up the science behind cooking.

Last year, the startup successfully completed a pre-seed funding round, raising Rs 11 crore from investors such as Draper Associates, Rukam Capital, Rainmatter (a Zerodha Fund), and angel investors, including the co-founders of Ather Energy and Unacademy. 

With funding from Khosla Ventures now, the company aims to grow its revenue to ₹150 crore in 2024 and scale the production to 20,000 units per annum in the next 6 months. Besides Khosla Ventures, upliance is closely working with Qualcomm. “Qualcomm has given us multiple grants to invest in this technology. Qualcomm India has been a great partner to us,” concluded Mody.