The following interview is a conversation we had with David Johnson, CEO of Dexai Robotics, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $12 Million Raised to Power the Future of Kitchen Automation
David Johnson
Brett, it’s great to be here.
Brett
Can we just kick off with maybe a little bit more about who you are and a bit about your background?
David Johnson
Absolutely. So, first and foremost, I’m a hobby chef, so I enjoy cooking. That’s one of the things I spend a lot of my free time doing. But that’s coupled, really with a background, a technical background. So I did a phd at physics, was building atomic clocks and the world’s most sensitive accelerometers before I decided it’d be a lot more fun to get into the hospitality industry and take my hobby of cooking and combine it with knowledge of robotics and automation and build really a solution that was able to prepare meals for people using the same ingredients and the same utensils that they already know and loves.
Brett
What’s your go to dish? Or what are you most known for? For making.
David Johnson
So I like doing a salmon with a maple lemon glaze. Actually really quite good. It’s not too strong, really lets the fish sort of shine through, but it’s also pretty fast to make and it’s a go to for busy nights as well as when I’ve got a bit of more free time.
Brett
Where’d the passion for cooking come from? Were you just doing this as far as you can remember? As long as you can remember, or.
David Johnson
Where did that come from? Well, actually, probably from my mother, actually. She was really a big home cook. Yeah. And then I spent a lot of time eating home cooked meals and then eventually just wanted to continue that because I was unable to really find. I’m sort of a big guy and I like to eat a lot. I wasn’t able to get what I wanted from being able to buy it, eating out. And that meant cooking for myself and then really engaging in that passion.
Brett
A few quick questions that we like to ask, and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick first one. When it comes to books, are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you and how we like to frame this? We got this from Ryan Holiday. He calls them quickbooks. So a quickbook is a book that rocks you to your core. It really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind?
David Johnson
Yeah, that’s a great question. And not one that I get usually asked, so two that sort of come to mind right off the top of my head. So 100 years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is this sort of, like, crazy magical realism novel that kind of flips everything that you think about on its head, and it takes the fantastical becomes commonplace, and commonplace becomes fantastical, and everybody sort of gets a different thing out of it. But it also points to the inescapability of history, or just this idea that people are always like, what came before is really dictating what comes after. And it’s incredibly, history doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often rhymes, as folks say. And I think that’s a really good lesson.
David Johnson
The other one, which is really also kind of similar to that, is a wild sheep chase by Murakami, which is another one of these. I guess it’s kind of similar theme, this strange, reality bending stories. But then the takeaway from it is everybody kind of has their own interpretation. And almost theme of the book is that everybody can read the same thing, but then they’re chasing down different ideas or different themes which are presented. And even when people have the exact same facts or words in front of them, they come up with different things which are important or different things to focus on. And that’s an important lesson for life.
Brett
Yeah, I read a lot of books, and very rarely does a guest come on and suggest a book or say a book that I haven’t even heard of, you just named two that I haven’t heard of. So really looking forward to digging into those.
David Johnson
Those sound great. Well, then 100 years of solitude won the Nobel Prize in literature in the think so. That one you should definitely check out.
Brett
Nice.
David Johnson
I’ll do that.
Brett
What about inspiration when it comes to founders? So are there any specific founders that you either know or you follow that you’ve just been really inspired by?
David Johnson
Yeah, that’s another actually really great question. And another hobby of mine, I guess, is I’m a pilot. And so immediately what comes to mind are our aviation founders. And so there’s this guy, Igor Sikorsky, who founded Sikorski aircraft and was the inventor of the first modern helicopter. So, like, whatever we think about helicopters, he built the first one. So above and beyond being, like, a technical Founder who designed 20 od different types of aircraft, when he designed the helicopter, no one knew how to be a helicopter pilot.
Brett
Right.
David Johnson
It was like the very first wand. And so he became the first helicopter pilot. And there’s a great photo of him on the first helicopter flight, sitting there, like in a bowler hat in this crazy contraption, flying a helicopter. And it’s like you talk about the ability to just get it done at risk to personal safety and venturing into the unknown.
Brett
How much of your time do you spend flying then? Are you flying like, once a week, once a month?
David Johnson
Not since starting the company. I’ve flown less and less than starting the company, unfortunately. Yeah. But no, I got my start in aviation and was my first job out of college was working for an unmanned helicopter company. So definitely an enthusiast there.
Brett
Are you surprised that you ended up being a Founder or being a CEO? Take us back to your mindset when you were 15, 1617 years old. Was that in your mind that this was someday going to happen?
David Johnson
Yeah, actually, I think so. And part of that comes from my grandfather, who started his own electronics. He was an electrical engineer. He started his own electronic company. And so it was definitely one of those things where I had been hearing about that for a very long time. And I think the idea of starting a company didn’t seem so daunting because of that. And like I mentioned, my first job out of college was a startup. And one of my mentors there, this guy, Abe Tarram, who’s another crazy, he’s founded five or six companies, sort of was very instrumental in talking through with me what it was like to actually start a company. And I was able to see it happening firsthand. Working for a startup, so that, I think, made it seem much more attainable because of that.
David Johnson
And maybe in hindsight, that could be a little bit of rose colored glasses, not seeing all the difficult sides, but, yeah, I think it was something that I’ve always thought about doing and figured I was going to do well.
Brett
Let’s switch gears and let’s talk about what you decided to do. So can you tell us about the problem that Dexai solves?
David Johnson
Absolutely. So we all have to eat. That’s part of the universal human experience. And most of us have prepared a meal at one time or another. And eventually, after you’ve prepared enough meals, you start doing things over and over again, which are repetitive and are really not the fun or engaging parts of cooking. And so the first idea here was like, hey, how can we build a robot which does the boring stuff, like the things that you don’t want to do day in and day out, and automation, or really, I should say, machinery has been part of cooking for a very long time. And so what we said is, hey, let’s try and add intelligence to this concept of machines which aid chefs.
David Johnson
So the problem that we solved really is building a robotic sous chef to assist chefs in doing mundane tasks where normally they would like to go to a helper and say, hey, I need you to assemble these ingredients into 100 identical salads, or we’re scooping berries and yogurt in gradola and creating yogurt parfaits or building fruit cups. And so these things have to happen on a scale of thousands and thousands a day, and it’s the same repetitive motion over and over again. And it’s just not something that is using a person’s creativity. And so our automation really does exactly that. It is able to assemble prepared ingredients into complete meals which are packaged and ready for sale.
Brett
Are there sous chefs everywhere then, that just think you’re the devil?
David Johnson
No, I think if you spent any time in a kitchen, you would see this as a godsend. It’s one of those things where we have been very engaging with our customer base and our user base. And bottom line, there’s a massive shortage of staff in commercial kitchens. And because of that, you often have the people who are there and who are showing up to work are dealing with more tasks and activities than they’re really able to handle. And so anything that can make their job easier is seen as a benefit.
Brett
And what types of commercial kitchens are you selling into? What’s, like that ideal customer profile today? Or what’s that profile that you’re seeing the most adoption with?
David Johnson
Yeah, so we’ve seen basically a lot of traction in amissary kitchens, which is really this places where you’re preparing tens to hundreds of prepackaged meals that go out into a refrigerator or out onto a line to be sold, like grab and go pickup style by customers. And so these meals have to be prepared basically fresh every day. And it’s a limited rotation. The menu isn’t that varied, but they’re incredibly popular. I know. I’m a huge consumer of them myself. I’m sure at an airport you’ve gotten a yogurt parfait or a Caesar salad or fruit cup or something like that. And what our customers do is they are institutions that have to staff those shelves, so either the operator themselves or a reseller, and they then prepare the meals, which then go and are purchased by consumers.
David Johnson
So we’re in some sense a b to c player, as in, we sell into these operators, and then the operators prepare meals for the consumer.
Brett
What’s the market size of organizations like that?
David Johnson
Oh, it’s absolutely massive. So you have something like 250,000 commercial kitchens in the United States, and this very small segment of them is in roughly one in ten, operates in something like this. So you have a pretty big market share. And there’s massive quantities of these kinds of prepared meals are consumed.
Brett
Do you get any resistance of people who just don’t feel comfortable with technology? Or they look at this robot, and I’m watching the robot as we have this conversation, and it is mesmerizing as it’s making the salad. Do you ever have a hard time with selling to people who are maybe afraid of technology like this?
David Johnson
Well, I would say that when we first started, people were rather skeptical, and they’re like, oh, I don’t want that in my kitchen. But then I think we have seen a shift, and Covid has accelerated this drastically where it’s just accepted and basically almost commonplace now with this idea of, oh, yeah, automation is coming, and this is just going to be something that we have in every kitchen. And also, I think that folks maybe don’t quite appreciate on how mechanized modern kitchens are today. In some sense, engineering was the very first thing that people did was figure out how to prepare food or use machines to help grow and prepare food. So we have a very long tradition of doing this, and so we’re in some sense, not that different from a big mixer or a fancy oven.
David Johnson
It’s just another technique and more skill going into a kitchen to solve an age old problem.
Brett
That makes a lot of sense. What’s your house look like with this stuff? Do you have one of these sitting in your kitchen?
David Johnson
No, my wife insists that it has to be smaller first before I can bring one home. But I think that’s the intention, or I’m going to sneak one in one of these days.
Brett
One of these days. Just like, keep it tucked in the closet.
David Johnson
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the right kitchen tools to aid and no more, which we take. Kind of that philosophy at techi is trying to pare down the tool to the minimum in order to make it be the most useful and nothing more. So we approach that from the standpoint of the UI like to try and make the user experience be incredibly simple, so that the robot is really making all the decisions, and you as a user don’t have to do very much. So it should be as incredibly simple as possible.
Brett
Obviously, every company is interested in ROI, especially, I think, in recent months and over the last twelve months, that’s been a huge topic of conversation for everyone. You seem like you may be in a very nice position there for an ROI narrative, because I’m guessing it’s a pretty clear shot, right? You’re saying that, hey, normally you’d have a human doing this, now you don’t need to do it. So the payback period is x months or x years. Do I have that right?
David Johnson
Exactly. And it depends a little bit on your volume. That’s really the only parameter that varies. So we have roughly around 50 units of an item. It is cheaper to have a robot in house than to buy from a third party. And at roughly 100 units, actually closer to about 90, it is cheaper to use a robot than any other mode of assembly. And then your payback period is anywhere from roughly about a year at those kind of minimum volumes, to. It can be as fast as like three months if you’re producing really high volumes.
Brett
What’s it like to scale production of a robot like this? If you wanted to scale alfred 100 x, what would that look like? What would that entail? And what would be some of those challenges that you didn’t count there?
David Johnson
Yeah, well, now you’re in our daily. This is what we’re living right now, let me put it that way. And so, scaling production, because it’s a hybrid hardware software solution, involves not only effort on the operational side. So how do we ship and install many more units than we do today? How do we actually produce those units in order to be able to ship and install them? And then how do we manage this fleet of smart devices installed at our customer sites as we add more and more units to it? And so those three aspects are really what are sort of keeping me up at night currently. And the operational piece of it actually turns out really probably to be the hardest one. So the tech is actually fairly straightforward.
David Johnson
But operationally, things like getting reliable Internet at your customer site, making sure that your customer knows how to handle a smart appliance and is able to use it, interfacing with IT departments, all of these things are challenging, and they’re not unique to kitchen automation. They’re part of, like this IoT devices in general.
Brett
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David Johnson
Yeah, exactly. So currently, like, yes, if we have a failure, we do have to send one of our own technicians, and we are working to expand that so that we can use local technicians and even use the customer themselves so that the customer actually can do a lot of replacements themselves. And we’re changing the system such that there are many more items which are replaceable by either the customer’s services department or even a skilled owner operator would be able to handle it. And that is really, I think, key to our scaling, is that could avoid having a large Maintenance deal.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. What about your market category? So I introduced you as a kitchen robotics company, which I think I kind of just made that up. Like, do you view that as your market category or what is the market category?
David Johnson
Yeah, I think we would say maybe kitchen automation, but that really is now a category. And it has become increasingly so, a real category with a vibrant ecosystem, a large number of players, and a lot of interest from the customers. So much so that you’re starting to see kitchen consulting groups knowing about automation and specking different automation solutions for the customer and so on. And so this is, I think, just the way the industry is going to go, is that when you’re standing up a new commercial kitchen, a large part of it will be automated.
Brett
When I think kitchen robotics or kitchen automation, the first thing that comes to mind is that startup that was backed by Softbank, I believe that just raised like a boatload of money they were going to disrupt the pizza industry with their robot. And then I think it didn’t work out very well. That’s very much stuck in my mind. And I would think that there’s other people who have seen that type of headline and that gets stuck in their head. Is that something that you’ve had to battle against at all of trying to change that perception that this is not like these other companies that have hyped up this technology?
David Johnson
Oh, absolutely. I think that it’s not even just kitchen robotics or kitchen automation, it’s automation in general, in that there have been a large number of maybe fairly public failures and not a huge number of wins like we have seen in the software space. And so that’s always, as people always say, right, hardware is hard and it is. There’s no getting around that. You have this challenge that you’re building something that fundamentally has to work in the real world and there’s benefits to that and that we all live in the real world, we all have to eat. This is the space that we occupy. So there’s limitations to what software can do for us.
David Johnson
So fundamentally, hardware is required as part of the human experience, but it does make for a more expensive journey, for sure, when you’re building devices that go into the customer site.
Brett
From my conversations with VCs and other founders, they said that they’re just seeing a big shift right now where maybe four, five, six years ago, VCs didn’t want to back hardware. They were generally afraid of hardware. But I’ve heard that’s changing now and hardware is cool. Everyone wants to be doing hardware. Is that something that you’re seeing as well? Have you seen that shift?
David Johnson
I mean, I think we’ve always been fortunate to have supportive and really excited backers who believed in our vision. I think that people are realizing and seeing more and more, like I said, that if you really want to affect the real world, you need to build. Right? And there are just limits to what you can do from a pure software.
Brett
Play in terms of traction and adoption. Are there any numbers that you can share?
David Johnson
So I think what the best one is, we’re basically looking to double our, every month the number of robots we ship. So that’s our north star here. And what really gets us excited is that we just see this continuing increase and improvement in willingness to adopt technology and excitement by our customers.
Brett
When do you think demand is going to be a problem? Do you think that’s like a problem that’s going to come in like three.
David Johnson
Years or could be. I think the demand for kitchen automation is going to be incredibly large. I think it’s going to be. The challenge probably is scaling the different product requirements so that there will always be customers who are excited about automation, but every restaurant is different and there’s a huge amount of variability in food and recipes and so on. And one of our key tenants is that we build robots which are recipe agnostic. Our robot doesn’t care what it’s actually making, which means the food that it prepares will taste like your food, not like the food that the Dexai robot made. But at the same time, that comes with challenges. And as we scale to more and more customers, we’re seeing that you have unique requirements for different cuisines.
David Johnson
And that’s going to be probably the big challenge for the whole industry, is how can you adapt to be able to really service the whole swath of the industry as opposed to just a small niche?
Brett
And are you selling direct to customers? I could have this completely wrong, but I feel like in a different conversation I had with the Founder, they told me in this space that a lot of sales happen through distributors and that there’s like a few distributors that really kind of control everything. Do I have that completely wrong, or is there like a distributor network that does have a lot of influence here?
David Johnson
Yeah, certainly. That’s certainly true. We are currently selling direct to customers, but that may change in the future.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, over $12 million raised so far. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
David Johnson
Probably the biggest lesson is raise more money than you think you need and don’t raise money unless you need it, which kind of go hand in hand. But I think that there really is some wisdom there in that venture. Money is expensive, right? You’re selling a portion of your precious idea and dream, but when you do decide to go out and raise money, you should raise as much money as you can get, because that’s when you have your most options and you’re able to keep that money in the bank and you don’t have to spend it right away. But at the same time, you don’t want to raise money if you don’t need it. Because don’t sell your dream if you don’t have to.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Let’s imagine you were starting over again today based on everything that you’ve learned. What would be the number one piece of advice that you give to yourself?
David Johnson
That’s another one of your great questions that requires a little bit of introspection and soul searching. But I think one of the things I think we would do differently is do more partnerships and build less of our technology in house. So we’ve built a lot of stuff ourselves, which has given us an incredible note, but it also is very expensive. It takes a lot of time to build all of that technology. And then secondly would be to spend more time with the customer earlier and really focus earlier. And I think that’s something that was. That was given to me in the very beginning and I didn’t really understand what it meant.
David Johnson
And I think at this point, this idea that the best thing you can do is to get a customer to give you money, because once they’re willing to give you money, you really have done something for them that is valuable and you can’t get that any other way. They’ll give you feedback and advice and tell you things all day long, but until you figure out what they actually are willing to part with their money for, that is the most valuable thing.
Brett
Final question for you. Since we’re almost up on time, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building here?
David Johnson
We’re really looking to put a robot in every kitchen, and not just commercial kitchens, but home kitchens and so on. It may be a little longer than three to five years to make that happen, but I think the vision in three to five years is that we are making a dramatic impact on how food in this category is prepared and we’re really servicing and feeding an incredible number of people every day.
Brett
You paint a picture of what that looks like and maybe go through both scenarios. Like ten years from now, what do you think the average commercial kitchen is going to look like? And then what do you think that average residential kitchen is going to look like?
David Johnson
Great question. I think in ten years the average commercial kitchen will have borrowed a lot of techniques from traditional manufacturing. So kitchens really are low rate factories just like anything else. And they deal with a perishable product and they produce goods which are basically consumed on site or nearly on site. So you’re going to see all of the tools that we’ve had come up in manufacturing for quality control, using computer vision to track inventory, being able to really understand and move your product around with automated solutions have metrics and computer control over every aspect in the kitchen. So, like, the idea that you don’t know what your oven is doing at any given point in time would be crazy because the oven is, you’re basically feeding data into your inventory management, so you know exactly what to buy.
David Johnson
In the future, all of that connectivity will be just standard. As far as the home kitchen, I think you will have a similar thing, but it’s going to be still a lot more manual. So I don’t know if you cook, I’m sure you get recipes on your phone and you don’t use a physical cookbook anymore. But that being able to link that with your purchasing and do that in a seamless way and be able to have tools to assist you in your preparing a meal that are really like software and computer vision tools, they don’t require actuators. It’s still smarts, and it still can help you through augmented reality. Are there ways to help you become a better cook?
David Johnson
And then finally, in terms of systems actually doing things for you, I think you will see a lot more sort of smart single devices that people like to purchase, which may or may not be all that helpful, but a lot of kitchens have a lot of smart single purpose devices. But then you’ll also have your standard oven be able to do smart process controls. So like this idea that, oh, no, I burned the turkey because I left it in too long. Well, you can have an oven that will actually know how to cook the turkey to perfection, as opposed to just being open looping and leaving it in for 5 hours. And a lot of that is in some sense available today.
David Johnson
But I think you’re going to see a lot more prevalence of those kind of tools and ease of use for everyday cooks.
Brett
I’m going to be so depressed when I cook dinner tonight. We’re sitting here doing the manual process. Everything’s been manual. I’ll be thinking, where’s album?
David Johnson
This idea of what you may have in your kitchen, depending on what type of oven you have. But just the simple idea of, like, you can put a thermometer, a temperature probe that’s linked to your oven, and so you cook only to the correct internal temperature of the protein, as opposed to you having to check it over and over again, makes a huge difference. Convection oven or steam ovens, things that you don’t have in your, a lot of people don’t have in their home kitchen.
Brett
Wow.
David Johnson
You can cut your cooking time to be a third. It’s like just standard in commercial kitchens, but very few home chefs have them or aware of these kind of improvements.
Brett
Very random, but I got an air fryer like six months ago, and that’s like one of my favorite things I have in the kitchen. And I just thought about, how did they pull that off? Because isn’t it just essentially like a convection oven? That’s all it is, but they rebranded it as an air fryer. And everyone I know, they love their air fryer. Like, you normally won’t talk about appliances that way, but people love their air fryers and live by them. So I think it’s a fascinating. Just from like a marketing perspective, what they managed to pull off of that category. Oh, absolutely.
David Johnson
I mean, you have things like. That’s what I mean by this rise in these, what I call these special purpose or single purpose devices. So, like Instapot air fryer, you have these fancy. Well, there’s so many different home coffee machines. People have, like, home roti machines and pita machines and bread makers and all of these things. So we will see more and more of those and they’ll get smarter and better. But I think, and this is sort of our philosophy at techsize, we want to see more of a convergence, rather than having to have a single purpose machine for absolutely everything that you do.
David Johnson
How can you make your multipurpose devices smarter such that they give you the same flexibility of, like, a single buttoning press and you get your meal, but it can do that for many different meals, and you don’t have to clutter your counter with 100 different appliances.
Brett
That’s so cool. All right, David, we’ll have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s anyone that’s just following in, and they just want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
David Johnson
They can find Dexai on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and our website, dexai.com.
Brett
Are you actively tweeting at all? Where can people find you personally?
David Johnson
They can find me personally, actually, probably easiest on LinkedIn.
Brett
David Johnson, just a couple of.
David Johnson
Yeah, David. Ms. Johnson. But yeah, that’s one of the problems with a common name.
Brett
David, thanks so much for taking the time to chat. This has been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I know the audience is going to as well, so really appreciate it.
David Johnson
Yeah, thanks for having me, Brett. No problem.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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