Home appliance tech company Up minimizes friction in home cooking

Food is the first to be sacrificed, be it when we are busy or tired. Going back home from the office and ordering food has become a common practice for the working youth of India. Companies of the likes of Zomato and Swiggy saw the potential in this and turned it into a pan India food delivery platform. Although its ease is comforting, the health concerns in the long run are concerning.

Promoting home cooking and aiming to reduce the friction in cooking, Mahek Mody and Mohit Sharma started Up in 2021. This Bangalore-based food and home appliance tech company designs and manufactures smart and connected consumer appliances.

The company’s flagship product is delishUp, a smart cooking assistant built for the purpose of making home cooking easier for young Indian homes. With over 250 recipes from various cuisines like continental, oriental, Indian, Filipino, and Ethiopian to choose from, the product alleviates the hassles of measuring ingredients, chopping, and cooking.

The appliance comes with an interactive 8-inch touchscreen and Smart Jar that automates chopping and stirring ingredients for a variety of dishes from gravies to one-pot meals. It holds enough food for 4 people and can also be used to keep the food warm and heat it.

delishUp has an AI framework, UpAI, which controls and manages the hardware functionality and recipe accuracy. The UpAI with ChatGPT now has encompassing knowledge of food, ingredients and recipes and can make generative and responsive suggestions to all cooking prompts and needs. The company is working on its AI for recipe creation and sharing features in order to create a community of users who use and follow user made recipes.

CEO and co-founder of the company, Mody told Entrackr. “With food available on food delivery apps and new recipes coming up on Instagram and YouTube, people are interested in experimenting with food. But this generation has not learned to cook from their parents. So we wanted to lessen the distance between these two doors.”

The food tech company has raised a total of $1.5 million over the period of one year which saw participation from Zerodha's funding arm - Rainmatter, Rukam Capital, Draper Associates, co-founders of Ather Energy and Unacademy, and other mini angel investors.

Although the company was set up in 2021, it started operations only five months back. Within the short span of 5 months, it has over 100 users per month spanning mainly over Bangalore, Pune, and Mumbai. It plans on expanding the delivery geography to Delhi soon.

By December, Up plans on reaching around 500-800 device sales a month and then gradually  expand to other cities to reach 1000 devices per month by the end of the financial year. The company plans of currently zeroing its focus on India as it considered the market wide enough to handle a few years of expansion.