22Astronauts

Rajat Bhageria is the Founder & CEO of Chef Robotics (San Francisco, CA), the leading physical AI company deploying AI-guided robot arms across food manufacturing and production facilities.
Instead of chasing restaurant cooking hype or $15/hr fast-casual makelines, Chef Robotics pivoted to high-volume food factories (including Amy's Kitchen, Chef Bombay, Gate Gourmet, and Sunbasket), recently surpassing 100M+ servings deployed in production across the US, Canada, and Europe.
After studying economics at Wharton and robotics at Penn's GRASP Lab, Rajat sold his first computer vision startup (ThirdEye) at age 20, co-founded pre-seed fund Prototype Capital, and launched Chef Robotics in 2019.
Backed by $65M+ in funding (from Kleiner Perkins, Avataar Ventures, Construct Capital, and SVB), Chef Robotics uses real-world production data to build domain-specific Food Foundation Models (FFM) and world models for deformable material handling.
𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑This podcast is brought to you by  CoreWeave  providing the specialized cloud infrastructure that powers physical AI and large-scale model training.

Chef Robotics: https://chefrobotics.ai
Rajat on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajatbhageria/
Ilir on X: https://x.com/IlirAliu_
Ilir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilir-aliu/

Timestamps:
0:00 Why Chef Robotics walked away from restaurant deals to focus on food factories
3:39 Growing up in Cincinnati: Reading biographies of Carnegie, Rockefeller & Edison
8:33 Building computer vision for the visually impaired (ThirdEye) at Penn
12:35 Basic research vs. Product execution: Why shipping matters
15:14 Why cooking robots fail: "Customers don't want cooking robots, they want assembly"
18:05 Expanding beyond prepared meals: Airline catering, meatpacking, and CPG kitting
22:04 Selling before building: Raising seed capital from Kleiner Perkins
25:34 Why every founder's primary job is persuasion and sales
33:23 The "Value Investing" approach in robotics: Finding high-volume factory assembly
36:08 Specialists vs. Humanoids: Why industrial plants need "Home Depot, not Costco"
41:34 Learning from the 2015 robotics graveyard: Why ROI trumps generalizability
46:28 Real-world production data vs. simulation: The Food Foundation Model
52:52 The Goal & Bottleneck Theory: Focusing strictly on operational constraints
59:20 Advice to my younger self: Category creation takes time

Almetra is turning the perception stack from self-driving cars into factory intelligence.
I sat down with Silviu Homoceanu, Co-Founder & CTO of Almetra, to talk about growing up with computers in post-communist Romania, eight years inside VW's self-driving programme, and why the data most factories run on doesn't describe what actually happens on the line.
Silviu learned programming by translating English menus on his father's work PC, was selling self-built accounting software at 15, and came to Germany for a PhD in machine learning. He joined VW Group Research in 2014 and spent the next eight years on perception for autonomous driving, before a question from a manufacturing colleague sent him into factories for seven months.
Today, Almetra (formerly Deltia) combines computer vision, sensors and machine data to show how production actually runs instead of how it was planned. The company raised a $19M Series A led by blisce/ in June 2026 and is opening an office in Boston.
We cover why factory data is often wrong, what happens when the MES reports a reality that isn't real, the 100% defect detection problem, why so many robotics startups get stuck in pilot purgatory, what reliability really means on a running line, and Almetra's move from measuring manual work to automating parts of it.
Silviu Homoceanu:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/silviu-homoceanu-893b7a5

Almetra:
https://www.almetra.ai/

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CoreWeave sponsors this podcast.

Join CoreWeave at #FullyConnected:
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𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

00:00 Meeting at the AI Campus in Berlin
00:47 Who Silviu is and what Almetra does
02:44 Romania after 1989 and his father's first PC
06:08 A 286 at home, MS-DOS, then Linux
08:04 Running a computer business at 15
10:21 High school nights in the computer lab
14:44 The mentor who said: study abroad
16:15 Flipping burgers to see the MIT campus
18:58 Romania vs Germany: theory against practice
20:23 First job: cluster computing for bridge simulations
26:20 Why computer networks stopped being enough
28:00 The exam answer that led to a PhD offer
30:47 Percentages or factors: how he picks problems
36:20 VW Research comes knocking in 2014
39:05 The meeting with manufacturing that changed everything
39:52 Seven months in factories: the data is wrong
40:30 Merantix, meeting Max, and founding the company
42:08 The Goal, bottlenecks, and life on a shop floor
43:31 The 100% defect detection problem
46:14 When the MES reports a reality that isn't real
48:09 Automating stations and the robotics angle
49:33 99.999% and why factories say no to startups
52:47 What is actually automatable today
55:07 The Series A, blisce/, and the move to Boston
59:21 Closing

Follow 22Astronauts:
Newsletter: 22astronauts.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/22astronauts
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Almond is building robots for the era of physical AI.
I sat down with Saba Khalilnaji, Founder & CEO of Almond, inside the company's San Francisco factory to talk about building robots, scaling hardware, factory automation, and why Almond wants to become "America's robot factory."
Saba started building robots as a kid, later spent nearly seven years at DoorDash, and eventually left to work on one of the hardest problems in automation: getting robots to operate reliably in factories where the environment and tasks constantly change.
Today, Almond is building Axol, a dual-arm robot designed for physical AI, data collection, teleoperation and real-world deployment.
We cover why traditional automation struggles in high-mix manufacturing, what Saba learned from DoorDash, the rise of "neo-integrators," why deployments are Almond's North Star, manufacturing robots in San Francisco, and Almond's work on teaching Axol to help build Axol.

Saba Khalilnaji:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/saba-khalilnaji/
Almond:
https://www.almond.bot/
𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑
• CoreWeave — The Essential Cloud for AI.
Join CoreWeave at Fully Connected in San Francisco, bringing together the people building the next generation of AI infrastructure and applications.
Learn more: https://www.coreweave.com/fully-connected-2026

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
00:00 Inside Almond's San Francisco robot factory
01:02 A first look at Axol
02:12 Building robots as a kid
07:50 Science Olympiad and early robotics
11:56 Studying bioengineering at Berkeley
14:58 From robotics to DoorDash
18:19 What DoorDash taught Saba about moving fast
22:37 Why he left to start a company
25:10 How your environment shapes ambition
29:28 Discovering the automation problem inside factories
31:06 Why traditional factory automation struggles
34:49 What Almond is building
36:03 The rise of the "neo-integrator"
38:36 Why deployments are Almond's North Star
40:17 Building America's robot factory
43:09 Why Almond believes in owning the full stack
44:05 Teaching Axol to help build Axol
46:09 Saba's advice to his younger self
47:25 Why it's called Almond
49:25 Closing

Follow 22Astronauts:

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LinkedIn:
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Prof. Mario Krenn is the Scientific Director & Co-Founder of Feyer GmbH and Professor for Machine Learning in Science at the University of Tübingen, where he leads the Artificial Scientist Lab.
For over a decade, Mario’s research has focused on using AI not just to analyze physics data, but at a conceptual level; building AI explorers that discover completely novel experimental setups, optics, and quantum hardware. In July 2026, alongside CEO Jonathan Klimesch and CTO Sören Arlt, he co-founded Feyer GmbH: a frontier AI lab for automated physical invention.
As one of only 10 European teams selected for SPRIND's €125M Next Frontier AI Challenge (€3M non-dilutive seed phase), Feyer couples neural explorers with ultra-fast, differentiable physics simulators. Their mission is to autonomously invent next-generation industrial hardware (from advanced microscopy and lasers to lithography and quantum sensors) scaling Europe's high-tech manufacturing strengths.

Feyer GmbH: https://feyer.ai
Mario Krenn: https://mariokrenn.wordpress.com
Ilir on X: https://x.com/IlirAliu_
Ilir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilir-aliu/

Timestamps:
0:00 "AI that invents industrial hardware": What is Feyer GmbH?
3:08 How the Cyber Valley ecosystem turned an academic researcher into a founder
5:43 Growing up in Austria: Programming operating systems at age 10
11:31 Stephen Hawking, mysteries of space, and choosing physics over engineering
15:01 Joining Anton Zeilinger's lab in Vienna: "What is the next to the next step?"
18:33 March 2014: Writing a program to design a quantum experiment humans couldn't solve
21:58 Finding solution.txt & the realization that computers can be creatively scientific
28:28 Moving to Toronto & Vector Institute: Learning AI material discovery from Alán Aspuru-Guzik
34:49 Returning to Europe & building the Artificial Scientist Lab in Erlangen & Tübingen
37:47 Asking questions to the universe: Why physics experiments are fundamental
43:35 Breaking resolution limits in microscopy & applying AI to industrial high-tech
45:49 Winning SPRIND's Next Frontier AI Challenge & founding Feyer GmbH
47:25 Scaling European hardware strengths: Semiconductor, photonics, and optics leadership.

Johannes Haux is the Co-Founder & CEO of kausable (Heidelberg, Germany), a deep-tech AI startup building reasoning-first causal foundation models.
Instead of memorizing internet-scale text patterns or relying on millions of trial-and-error attempts, kausable’s models (based on the Prior-data Fitted Network / PFN approach) learn abstract cause-and-effect structures from synthetic data—enabling them to adapt to entirely new physical environments in-context from just a handful of examples.
After working in computer vision under Prof. Björn Ommer at Heidelberg University (alongside the future Black Forest Labs founders) and serving as Head of AI at AskUI, Johannes co-founded kausable with Dr. Benjamin Herdeanu (CTO) and Gregor Ramien (COO). The company recently raised a €12M seed round led by UVC Partners and Entourage, backed by top-tier angels from OpenAI, DeepMind, Black Forest Labs, and Neura Robotics.

kausable: https://kausable.ai
Johannes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhaux/

Ilir on X: https://x.com/IlirAliu_
Ilir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilir-aliu/

Timestamps:
0:00 Building foundation models in the Cyber Valley deep-tech ecosystem
1:25 Working in Prof. Ommer’s lab & meeting the future Black Forest Labs team
3:48 Early startup lessons at Sysmagine & AskUI
4:09 Why internet-scale LLMs aren't enough for general-purpose physical intelligence
4:52 Discovering Prior-data Fitted Networks (PFNs) & founding kausable
7:00 "I was a bad student": Why structure and habits matter more than raw talent
12:19 Wanting to be a movie director before choosing physics at Heidelberg
18:37 Quitting academia right before COVID lockdowns & taking the entrepreneurial leap
27:38 Why community & ecosystem matter for European deep-tech startups
29:26 How humans actually learn vs. brute-force reinforcement learning in robotics
32:01 In-context learning: Adapting to distribution drift & new sensors without retraining
33:47 TipPFN & predicting critical transitions: Seizures, blackout risks, and physical dynamics
37:37 Michael Black's perspective: Why Europe is a strong launchpad for disruptive AI
41:37 Exploratory tech vs. concrete customer problems: Making the "faster horses" bet
47:17 Moving from a research lab to early design partners
50:36 "Don't fake it, but think big": Advice for European deep-tech founders