Cala, a French pasta restaurant where the chef is a robot, raises €5.5M

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Paris-based Cala, a company using advanced robotics to make “high-quality” meals accessible to everybody, announced that it has secured €5.5M in its Seed round of funding. 

The round was led by BACKED VC with participation from Possible Ventures, Kima Ventures, Quiet Ventures, and Acequia Capital.

With this round, the company claims to have raised €6.5M in funding to date, following a €1M pre-seed investment in 2019. Early supporters of Cala include The Family and angel investors including Jerome Tafani, CEO of Burger King France, and Thibaud Elziere, Founder of Fotolia and eFounders.

Funds to expand restaurant locations

Cala has built the first fully robotic pasta restaurant in the world. The company created a pasta-making robot to autonomously cook ‘affordable, nutritious, sustainable, and delicious meals,’ and transform the cost and experience of fast-casual dining. 

Earlier in 2021, the company opened its first restaurant in Paris’ 5th arrondissement. Customers order food via a terminal in the restaurant and select the type of pasta and sauce they want. The robot then prepares the order and is entirely visible to customers in the restaurant. 

Since its inception in 2017, Cala claims to have prepared 25,000 meals and its gross merchandise value (GMV) is growing at 92 per cent month-on-month.

After witnessing such growth, the company plans to invest the newly raised capital to expand in France, and in new locations in Europe. 

The funds will also be invested in increasing the company’s workforce across its engineering, product, and operations teams.

First pasta restaurant, where the chef is the robot

Founded in 2017 by engineering students, the idea for the company took seed after the founders realised that getting good quality and convenient food on a student budget was difficult. They believed that technology held the answer.

The company was built by co-founders Ylan Richard, a former engineering student who dropped out of university aged 19 to pursue building Cala, Julien Drago, who deepened his manufacturing expertise while working at a makerspace, and Nicolas Barboni, who previously built a travel startup before selling to a competitor.

Ylan Richard, says, “As students, we were frustrated by the cost and lack of healthy meals available to us. Through our research, and driven by our own stomachs, we could see that the food service industry is broken. In fast food, the low-profit margin means that it’s impossible to use higher quality ingredients.”

Richard adds, “We realised that if you could automate the meal preparation, you could rapidly increase the number of meals being produced and improve the economics. We decided to focus on pasta as it can be customised and we could also reduce the number of meals that include meat, offering customers delicious food that is more sustainable, healthy, and affordable. We’ve been building and iterating on our robot and our autonomous kitchen can now make 400 pasta dishes in one hour.”

Cala is also available across delivery apps, including UberEats, and Deliveroo, which currently make up 95 per cent of its business. 

Andre de Haes, Founding Partner at BACKED VC, adds, “It’s remarkable seeing a team of 23-year-olds execute at this pace. Not only has Cala built extremely advanced pasta-making robots, but they also have the branding talent which should make Cala a household name. Cala is riding major macro trends: a growing demand for healthy affordable food, the changing economics of high street retail, and the increasing acceptance of advanced robotics in daily lives. The proof is in the pasta.”

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Vishal Singh

Vishal Singh is a News Reporter and Social Media Marketing Lead at Silicon Canals. He covers developments in the European startup ecosystem and oversees the publication's social media presence. Before joining Silicon Canals, Vishal gained experience at the Indian digital media outlet Inc42, contributing to its growth with insightful content. Despite being a college dropout, his passion for writing has driven his career in journalism.

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