Kaikaku

Kaikaku is a London-based robotics and automation company building modular kitchen technology for the food service and hospitality industry. Founded in 2023 by Josef Chen, Dr David Sharp, Piers Millar, and Junaid Hussain, the company takes its name from the Japanese concept of radical change — reflecting its ambition to fundamentally transform how commercial kitchens operate. The company is backed by 7Percent Ventures, Auctor, and Interface Capital, and is advised by senior figures from Subway, Mars Inc, and Caffè Nero.

Kaikaku targets the structural labour crisis in UK hospitality, where a chronic shortage of kitchen staff — exacerbated by Brexit, pandemic-era career shifts, and difficult working conditions — has driven up operating costs and reduced kitchen capacity at scale. Rather than replacing front-of-house hospitality with robots, Kaikaku focuses on automating back-of-house prep tasks: the high-volume, repetitive work of portioning, assembling, and dispensing food that occupies the bulk of kitchen labour time.

The company's core product, Fusion, is a modular kitchen automation system capable of assembling over 360 customised bowls per hour. Kaikaku operates Common Room, a bowl restaurant in London's Brunswick Centre, as a live testing environment for its technology — allowing rapid hardware and software iteration in a real commercial setting. The system integrates ordering kiosks, robotic preparation, AI quality assurance, and predictive analytics into a unified platform.

In 2024, Kaikaku raised £1.4 million to accelerate hardware and software development, expand pilot deployments with hospitality partners, and scale towards commercial operations. The raise positions the company at the forefront of food robotics in the UK.