Exclusive Interview | Mahek Mody, Co-founder and CEO, Up⤴️
/“Food is the way to Indian hearts and we wanted to build an “upliance” that solves the most asked question in every Indian Household, a version of “What to eat today?””
Tell us about your journey. How did it all start?
In 2023 there is ubiquitous internet at homes and connected appliances could transform your every day. Like mobile phones, laptops, smart TVs did for a generation — changed the way we work, communicate, discover and enjoy entertainment. Our home appliances and consumer durables could be doing the same thing. Connected appliances should exist and they should run like magic. The technology to level them up exists today. They just need to be designed and built.
That’s the premise that kickstarted the journey for us. Both Mohit and I, stepped out from the popular Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) and EV sectors to find the next big thing. Our collaboration was born from our shared experiences working as hardware engineers and our aligned vision for levelling up home appliances at large. We began our journey of building Up⤴️ as a brand that develops devices with the goal of providing young homeowners a new way of smart living.
India has become one of the largest markets for home appliances, and while the Indian buyer is spending $ 26 billion per year on these purchases, they are still buying products that are designed for the 1970s with technology from the 2000s. At Up⤴️, we decided to build consumer appliances that are designed for the new India.
Like many other millennials, we faced a common problem when it came to cooking at home. The gap between what we wanted to cook and what we could cook was the biggest barrier. Hiring a cook seemed like an option, but finding one that could be trusted was a challenge. On a daily basis, we would go home, hoping for a new and exciting meal, only to be disappointed by the same tired recipes from the cook or to resort to ordering from one of the usual four go-to restaurants. With the pretext we built an “upliance” that sends empowers people to cook dishes such as pad thai, momos, pastas, and rice bowls with ease, regardless of their skills.
We built the delishUp⤴️, a smart kitchen assistant that let’s you cook what you want. With the delishUp⤴️, boring meals are a thing of the past.
Making a vision into a reality can be very daunting. We would love a deep dive into your process for all your initiatives.
We started with a mission to build smart and connected appliances for the modern Indian home. By all conventional metrics, consumer durables have been a fabulous success story, evidenced by the behemoth brands who populate this segment. In going from one market to the next, however, the engines of growth for the entire industry — their products themselves, have hardly changed. We started out with wanting to build appliances that run like magic and the kitchen was our first target.
Food is the way to Indian hearts and we wanted to build an “upliance” that solves the most asked question in every Indian Household, a version of “What to eat today?”
The very first prototype we built of the delishUp⤴️ could do the very basic of cooking, chopping and cooking. We further developed a more sophisticated model that could do precise chopping, controlled stirring and cooking that was controlled by a time and temperature based algorithm. Our beta users were actively involved in defining what the delishUp⤴️ should be like and what features it should have.
Within a month of developing this prototype, we were testing the delishUp⤴️ in real Indian kitchens, with over 500 households across India participating in our beta home trials. With consumers in the loop giving us active feedback and sharing their experiences, we were able to train our AI on the delishUp⤴️ with 5000+ cooking sessions, making it better and more intuitive with each session. We were able to deliver great food consistently with all the data we gathered from cooking sessions. We were able to build the delishUp⤴️ to be a one-stop solution for everything. From concept to delivery within 18 months, we saw one of the quickest turnaround times on product development by any hardware startup.
When we began delivering across India in January 2023, the delishUp⤴️ had 200+ recipes and was consistently delivering great food every time. The delishUp⤴️ also had a phone app with which owners could plan their meals, download grocery lists and monitor the progress of their cooking on the delishUp⤴️ remotely in real time.
Post the start of deliveries, delishUp⤴️ owners have received several Over the Air updates which have included feature updates like recipe mini player, manual mode presets and the biggest of them all- the integration of ChatGPT. We have also launched a beta version of a AI recipe & cooking generator called “ChefGPT”, using which one can generate any recipe they’d like in the delishUp⤴️ guided recipe format.
We have only reached the tip of the iceberg with respect what we want to achieve with building connected home appliances. We know that our users are our biggest asset when it comes to product development and they are also our biggest cheer leaders when it comes to encouraging us to keep innovating- with this achieving our vision does not seem all that daunting.
Why did Up⤴ integrate ChatGPT into its smart cooking assistant and how is it going to alter the consumer experience with delishUp⤴?
ChatGPT has altered the way people are living today. They are using it for everything from writing content and getting recipe suggestions to making travel itineraries and explaining complex topics. We integrated ChatGPT into the delishUp⤴️, to enhance the user experience and create a more conversational and personalized cooking assistant.
ChatGPT has an all-encompassing knowledge of cuisines, ingredients, and recipes, which allows it to make generative and responsive suggestions to all cooking prompts and needs.
The chatbot feature caters to the varied needs, requirements, and preferences of its owners. Users can ask questions, make requests, and receive recommendations in a natural language format, which can make the cooking experience feel more personalized and engaging. In addition, users can experiment with creating new dishes with the beta AI recipe generator called the ChefGPT. They can use the generator to create unusual recipes like a Mushroom Sambar or an Avatar-themed pasta.
This integration has not only expanded what one could be eating at home every day but has also given owners the ability to customise and tailor these recipes according to their preferences or lifestyle.
Overall, the integration of ChatGPT into delishUp⤴️ can exponentially alter the consumer experience by offering a smart cooking assistant that not only does the cooking for them but also learns and adapts to each user’s preferences and needs.
This can make home cooking fun and engaging for users and can also help them choose a healthy lifestyle by ditching ordering in or settling for packaged foods.
How is ChatGPT and AI transforming the F&B and Food Technology industry?
With Up⤴️ being one of the first startups in the world to integrate ChatGPT into home appliances, we are leading the way in the sector. We expect Up⤴️’s AI integration to be a major driver of the growth of smart and connected technology in the home appliances industry in India.
Historically, food automation and AI have been used by the F&B industry for quality checks and large-scale manufacturing. The food tech industry also largely caters to the B2B segment and their products can be seen in cloud kitchens and restaurants.
Up⤴️ is bringing the AI & automation revolution to home kitchens and changing the way Indians are eating and cooking. The delishUp⤴️ has already helped hundreds of homes reduce their reliance on ordering in for their daily food. Empowering everyone at home to be able to cook is a game changer for the retail food industry.
The future of AI in consumer brands and how Up⤴️ plans to leverage this technology to drive growth and innovation.
AI can make life easier by helping us to choose from an infinity of options, making it faster and easier to select a product through tailored recommendations: which movies to watch, investments to make, routes to drive, and which products to buy – among many other things. AI has been used by the software as service (SaaS) companies to optimize for experience for their users and to process and analyze large-scale data in the backend.
With Up⤴️ being one of the first startups to integrate ChatGPT into home appliances, we are leading the way in the sector. We expect Up⤴️’s AI integration to be a major driver of the growth of smart and connected technology in the home appliances industry in India. With AI, our “upliances” can learn to understand the habits and preferences of the user and tailor their functionality accordingly. We at Up⤴️ want to build tech that seamlessly integrates into our lives and the use of AI will be a key driver of this. How we interact with our home appliances will change as we know it as with the growth if AI integration in home appliances.
We aim to define and in turn drive growth and innovation in how home appliances of the future should look like by building smart and connected devices that seamlessly integrate with our lives.
What are the brand’s future projections?
We aim to be in 1.5 lakh homes across the country by the end of the year, with a revenue target of INR 150 crores by FY25. The consumer appliance industry is a $30B industry in India with a 14% CAGR and we expect to capture 20% of this market over 8 years.
