Update: The company’s IdieGoGo campaign for its Cooki robot is now live.
Here at TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield at CES 2015, Sereneti Kitchen showed off an automatic tool that helps people cook.
The company has created a device that, via a simple stirring motion, can cook you dinner. Something akin to a cross between a quick crockpot and C-3PO, the Sereneti device takes in ingredients, stirs and prepares them for you — insert food, exit dinner.
For now, the device is limited to a single motion (stirring), but I spoke with the team, and it indicated a desire to add additional cooking mechanisms. You could imagine a slicing feature, a blending feature, and so forth.
Here’s the company’s tool in action:
Sereneti, bootstrapped to date, has spent around $150,000 to get as far as it has. The company told TechCrunch that it will raise more capital via a “convertible round” after its launch.
Currently Sereneti is a device, a four-person team, and the pursuit of capital. They have large dreams, however. Akin to how Keurig has built an empire off of selling K-Cups that slot into its coffee machines, Sereneti has the idea of building food pods, if you will, that you could pick up at the local store and then use at home.
You honestly can’t just eat pizza and burritos the rest of your life. I’ve tried. You end up staring down the barrel of a treadmill, frowning. At the same time, cooking can be an intensely time-consuming process that demands both creativity and planning. Sereneti, if it can pull off its vision, will provide a happy medium between the normal cooking process, and the simplicity of ordering in.
The market has proven in the last half decade or so, with the success of companies like GrubHub and Seamless, that demand for quick access to prepared foods is massive.
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As a member of its target demographic, I like the idea behind the startup. Health via robotics isn’t something that we have to look forward to anymore, it’s all but here.
How quickly, regardless of current schedule, Sereneti can get its product into the market, how low it can keep its price, and how long it will take to line up commercial deals with foodsellers to make the daily restocking of delivered machines simple enough to make the entire model work are its next challenges. Still, no more cooking? Yes, please.
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