TMTPOST — Commercial cooking robotics startup T-Chef [Zhigu Tianchu] completed a strategic funding round approaching 100 million yuan ($13.9 million), the company announced recently. The capital injection was led by China Merchants Venture, with follow-on participation from Leap Capital alongside oversubscribed re-investments from existing shareholders, including Forbes-backed Genesis Capital and Qifu Capital. The Shenzhen-based enterprise will deploy the fresh capital to accelerate physical artificial intelligence research and scale its automated commercial kitchen hardware and digital recipe platforms across international catering markets. By converting chef expertise into standardized hardware execution and cloud-managed recipes, the company has commercialized automated cooking systems across high-density dining networks while achieving operational profitability. Commercial food service operators across global retail and hospitality sectors are increasingly adopting robotic preparation hardware to offset rising labor costs and ensure kitchen quality consistency. Integrating embodied AI models into commercial kitchen appliances allows food service enterprises to streamline back-of-house operations without incurring heavy customization costs for regional menu variations. As venture deployment shifts toward specialized industrial automation, hardware developers with proven unit economics, proprietary recipe algorithms, and international distribution pipelines are attracting growth capital from institutional and state-backed investors.