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Many of us strive to eat healthier, especially when on-the-go, but getting access to food that fits our unique health needs and our unique taste preferences is hard.
That’s why Blendid was created, a contactless and autonomous robotic food kiosk that uses advanced technology – including robotics, machine vision, and artificial intelligence – to prepare and serve healthy and delicious food, customized to your preferences.
It all began in 2015. Three co-founders, Venki Ayalur, Vijay Dodd, and Vipin Jain wanted to have fresh, healthy, and personalized food available for anyone, anytime, anywhere. As seasoned techies and entrepreneurs, they pondered how technology could help.
Creating food that is tailored to an individual’s specific needs is difficult and time-consuming when prepared in a traditional kitchen. But, when leveraging technology – specifically robotics, machine learning, and AI – they thought there could be a way to automate the process, thereby creating efficiencies and enabling accessibility more broadly and at a reasonable price.
In 2019, after much trial and error, the first Blendid concept, a robotic smoothie kiosk, was finally created and commercially launched. Since then, Blendid has opened more kiosks in universities, big box retail stores (Walmarts), and malls. Blendid has also signed a commercial agreement with Jamba that will allow the companies to expand and deploy “Jamba by Blendid” kiosks across the country in various types of commercial locations.
While they started with a robotic smoothie kiosk, their vision is to serve a complete array of healthy, affordable foods using robotics. Their goal is to deploy these kiosks in all types of food service environments. Blendid's advanced food operating system will expand and adapt to other formats and cuisines including soups, bowls, and more.
About the founders
Venki Ayalur, Vijay Dodd and Vipin Jain are the three founders of Blendid; they met while working together at Barnes and Noble Nook.
Venki Ayalur is a passionate leader in building market-defining, innovative technologies and products. He is experienced in creating products that span across the software and hardware spectrum, and is versatile in building, coaching, and mentoring teams to create greater value for both the team and the company.
Vijay Dodd, prior to co-founding Blendid, worked as Sr. Director of Engineering at Barnes and Noble, Director at both Palm Inc and Cambridge Technology Partners, and Senior Manager at AT&T.
Vipin Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Blendid. From his fascination with Star Trek came his love of all things robotic, notably the 'replicator' seen in the franchise, which was a system that could create food and water from pure energy, and would be created to perfection every single time. So came the idea for the robot of the smoothie making world.
