T-Chef

T-Chef (智谷天厨) is a Chinese cooking-robot startup founded in 2018 by Geng Kaiping, who serves as its founder and CEO . The company develops intelligent cooking equipment specialized in Chinese cuisine, offering everything from single-unit robots to full smart-kitchen upgrades for enterprise clients . Its core pitch rests on an AI-driven dynamic heat-control algorithm, full premix combustion technology, and a cloud-connected sensor stack that together aim to replicate wok hei and other hallmarks of freshly cooked Chinese food at scale .

Yunqi Capital has backed T-Chef since its Pre-A round and continued through its Series A, a RMB tens-of-millions financing closed in late 2025 . The firm is slated to rebrand as Qianyi Intelligence (仟弈智能) in early 2026 . In the market, T-Chef has landed deployments with chains such as Laoxiangji and JD 7Fresh, and claims an industry-record RMB 150 million order secured by an eight-person sales team . Geng, who has spent two decades in the industry, has described the company's operating mode as a rare "technology R&D + scenario landing" dual-wheel drive .