Ivan Tregear is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at KAIKAKU.AI With a background in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London. Over the last 3 years, he has led the growth of technology at KAIKAKU, having overseen bringing the first prototype to readiness in 70 days, to deploying London’s first robot automated restaurant with Fusion. Through this KAIKAKU has been awarded the UK’s Best Use of Automation in F&B, and Ivan has been recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and is currently the UK’s youngest chartered engineer.
Having spent the last two years running our own restaurant and using it to iterate hardware, software and AI on a daily basis, we realized we had underestimated the challenge of deploying hardware at scale. This is how we, at KAIKAKU.AI, pivoted within 25 days.
At KAIKAKU we are creating the best restaurant experiences through hardware, software and AI. For the last two years we ran our own restaurant, Common Room, which we used as a living laboratory. All engineers worked in the basement, to allow us to strive for the fastest iteration cycle possible. Thousands of tweaks later, our food assembly robot Fusion, was ready for deployment into the wider world. Having quickly realized the challenges going from supervised self operation, to full scale deployment, we realized we needed an alternative commercialization strategy. Instead of trying to solve the entire vertical stack at once, we tried to come up with the leanest, simplest and most immediately value accretive solution we could. Here’s how we went from problem to product in just 25 days.