Cooking Robot Startup T-Chef Turns Profitable, Yunqi Capital Leads Nearly 100 Million Yuan Strategic Follow-On Round | Yunqi Partners

Recently, T-Chef, an early Yunqi Capital portfolio company specializing in intelligent cooking robots, announced the completion of a new strategic funding round of nearly RMB 100 million. This round was led by China Merchants Capital, with existing shareholders including Yunqi Capital making additional investments beyond their pro-rata rights.

Yunqi Capital has backed T-Chef since its Pre-A round. From reliably reproducing a single dish to understanding real-time changes in ingredients, temperature, and heat control, T-Chef is building around a core of "cooking robot hardware + AI digital dish large model," transforming Chinese cuisine — long dependent on the intuition of chefs — into a product capability that can be developed, replicated, and continuously iterated. The company has already surpassed RMB 100 million in revenue while maintaining profitability, with products deployed across multiple countries and regions worldwide. Learn more below alongside Yunqi Partners.

(Previously, T-Chef founder and CEO Dr. Kaiping Geng also appeared on Yunqi's tech podcast "Attent!on" — listen here.

The following content is republished from "Hard Kr"

Original title: "Hard Kr Exclusive | First to Achieve Profitability, T-Chef Secures Nearly RMB 100 Million Led by China Merchants Capital"

Recently, intelligent cooking robot company T-Chef officially announced the completion of a new strategic funding round of nearly RMB 100 million. This round was led by China Merchants Capital, with Yueqian Capital participating, and existing shareholders Yunqi Capital and Qifu Capital making additional investments beyond their pro-rata rights.

In the current capital environment, existing shareholders over-subscribing is often the most direct vote of confidence in a company's commercial execution capabilities and technological moat. With "cooking robot hardware + AI digital dish large model" at its core, T-Chef is transforming the segments of Chinese cuisine that heavily rely on chef experience into standardized, scalable product capabilities. Following this funding round, the company will continue advancing physical AI R&D and accelerate the global deployment of Chinese and pan-Asian cuisine.

AI Digital Dish Large Model: Empowering Products and Delivery, First to Achieve Profitability

The commercial intelligent cooking sector has entered deep waters. For restaurant clients, purchasing cooking robots was never about the machines themselves — it's about stable, delicious dish output. But traditional programmable stir-fry machines can only execute fixed instructions; different brands and regions define taste differently, and ingredient selection, budget tiers, and portion sizes all vary, meaning the "dish programs" required are completely distinct. To eliminate these differences, the industry's conventional approach has been to continuously invest heavily in dish R&D and service personnel, developing custom solutions store by store — using human labor to compensate for insufficient intelligence, driving delivery and operational costs sky-high. This has long been one of the sector's fundamental barriers to profitability.

T-Chef's "AI Digital Dish Large Model"

T-Chef's answer is a standardized, scalable product: on one end, cooking robot hardware; on the other, an "AI digital dish large model" running simultaneously in the cloud and on-device. The hardware handles stable execution, while the digital dish large model shifts dish development from reliance on human experience to model-driven processes — clients can nimbly develop and iterate dishes within the model layer, accounting for local taste preferences, ingredient supply chain characteristics, budget constraints, and even per-portion size variations. Combined, these form a complete "hardware + AI digital dish large model" product, rather than a passive device executing pre-set programs.

Behind this lies a design that appears contradictory but is actually critical. Deliciousness has no universal standard; diversity and individuality are the very soul of Chinese cuisine. What T-Chef provides is not a fixed recipe, but a "standardized dish development capability" — empowered by this standardized capability, clients can actually produce more personalized dishes. The recipes are standardized, the flavors are diverse, and what bridges the two is the model, not human labor.

More critically, this model-driven product naturally creates a "data flywheel" effect for clients: every time a robot operates, real cooking and operations data continuously flows back; millions of structured real cooking data points accumulated daily train the cloud model; after model iteration, updates are pushed in batches to all intelligent terminals, making each device's output more stable and dish development more efficient.

Better output drives higher efficiency, which attracts more store deployments, which generates more data — stores, data, and models mutually reinforce each other, and the flywheel spins ever faster. It is under this flywheel that dish quality becomes fully traceable throughout the entire process and reliably reproduced across different stores and regions; the company's growth no longer depends on linear stacking of human resources, but accelerates with expanding data scale — this is T-Chef's deepest moat.

"The wok-tossing techniques, intuitive heat control, and seasoning secrets of veteran chefs — those unique skills held by master craftsmen, those local flavors on the verge of being lost — are being preserved as traceable, inheritable digital assets through data collection and model training," said T-Chef founder Dr. Kaiping Geng.

In his view, cooking robots with intelligent hardware as their vehicle and the AI digital dish large model as their foundation are building a "digital ark" for millennia-old Chinese culinary arts.

This business model centered on standardized products and a data platform is now being validated in performance. In a sector where losses are generally traded for scale, profitability is the true touchstone of a viable business model — and T-Chef is among the few cooking robot companies with revenue exceeding RMB 100 million that has achieved profitability. Existing customers are repurchasing strongly, new customers are diverse and continuously expanding, and the company is developing healthily and rapidly overall, with 2026 revenue projected to maintain 300% growth over 2025. The company's products have penetrated diverse sectors including intelligent manufacturing, senior care, campus dining, fast-food chains, fresh retail, and hospitality; recently, they were deployed in the cafeteria of the world's largest new energy vehicle manufacturer, and rolled out across school cafeterias in Beijing, with clients including leading enterprises and institutions across various sectors.

When "Heat Control Intuition" Meets Hardcore Engineers

If the AI digital dish large model solves "what to cook," then ensuring the same dish can be reliably reproduced across different stores requires crossing another hurdle in the physical world: ingredient batches vary, ambient temperatures fluctuate, and deploying the same dish model across different terminals doesn't necessarily yield the same taste. Traditional stir-fry machines remain at the "numerical control execution" stage, mechanically repeating preset times and temperatures, unable to handle this complexity. The "physical AI" that T-Chef has been continuously developing is precisely designed for this.

The essence of "physical AI" is enabling machines to no longer mechanically follow recipes, but to understand real physical processes and adjust in real-time. Its long-term goal is to transform the heat judgment and operational habits that excellent chefs develop through experience into measurable, analyzable, verifiable, and continuously iterable engineering parameters and algorithmic models, forming a complete closed-loop control — so that the output of dish models is precisely translated into stable results for every cooking session.

T-Chef's multimodal AI perception system

At the end of 2025, new CTO Vincent officially joined T-Chef and established an independent AI cooking R&D team. Vincent received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tsinghua University, and his Ph.D. through a joint program between the National University of Singapore and MIT, subsequently serving as a senior engineer at Apple. Over the years, he has accumulated deep hands-on experience in robotics, sensors, algorithms, and software-hardware systems development, and was deeply involved in the R&D and large-scale mass production of consumer-grade intelligent hardware.

Currently, the team is conducting R&D and small-scale validation around cooking data collection, multimodal perception, and cooking parameter optimization — using temperature, weight, visual, and equipment operational data to identify initial ingredient states and key variations during cooking, and preserving the relationships between these variations and parameters such as heat intensity, timing, rotation speed, and ingredient-adding rhythm as continuously trainable models.

"I hope our intelligent cooking robots can become 'intelligent partners' for food service professionals, transforming cooking from an experience-dependent 'manual labor' into a precisely controllable, freely creative enjoyment," said Vincent.

From "Going Out" to "Integrating In": Overseas as the "Second Growth Engine"

Overseas markets are opening new growth space for T-Chef.

Since late 2025, average daily overseas client visits have increased roughly threefold, with visit-to-contract conversion rates exceeding 50%. Its overseas business growth rate ranks among the industry's highest, with products already deployed across Europe, North America, Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Korea.

Overseas clients show strong interest in T-Chef's intelligent cooking robots

Behind this high growth lies deep insight and judgment regarding overseas food service markets. "In global food service markets, pan-Asian cuisines represented by Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian food are seeing continuously rising consumer demand and steadily expanding market scale," said T-Chef's overseas business lead.

In March this year, Italian restaurant owner Marco brought a T-Chef intelligent stir-fry robot into his kitchen. Unexpectedly, this robot allowed his restaurant to overnight "grow" more than a dozen new Chinese dishes — from kung pao chicken to dry-fried beef ho fun, with stable output and authentic wok hei. Guests had more new options to try, return rates increased, and monthly revenue rose by nearly 30%. Marco smiled and said: "It broke the mystery of Chinese cuisine for me, injected new vitality into the restaurant, and achieved new revenue growth for the store."

Overseas scenarios differ from domestic ones; true international expansion doesn't mean copying the China playbook. In the process of co-creating with overseas clients, Brian, a Chinese restaurant owner in the United States who had long struggled with back-of-house staffing shortages and unstable output during dinner rushes, exclaimed "Amazing!" after using T-Chef cooking robots; Japanese izakaya operator Mr. Ono noted that it perfectly reproduced and integrated local teriyaki sauce flavors; Turkish client Muhammad frankly stated that the machine's stir-fried noodles had better evenness than manual cooking, sincerely remarking: "This is exactly what we wanted!"

"Cooking robots are one of the few areas in intelligent robotics that can truly land in business scenarios and create closed-loop user value, and we are very confident in their large-scale adoption," said a China Merchants Capital investor. "Through in-depth research of the industry's major players, we found that the T-Chef team, with the least capital in the industry, built the best product and ran through the most efficient commercialization path."

From T-Chef to Qianyi Intelligence: A Future-Oriented Strategic Upgrade

It is understood that to better align with its globalization strategy and "cooking big data + physical AI" technology core, T-Chef is about to complete a comprehensive brand upgrade, officially rebranding as "Qianyi Intelligence" — "Qian" represents thousands of intelligent terminals deployed globally, while "Yi" represents the intelligent game driven by data and models. Behind this brand upgrade lies a more fundamental vision: technology that makes cooking borderless and gastronomy accessible to all.