Just a few years in the past, Lance Lentini was a 12 months out of school when he began working at DEKA Analysis & Improvement, a know-how improvement agency. This wasn’t simply any engineering agency; it was the incubation hub for Dean Kamen, one in all America’s most famous inventors, answerable for a plethora of innovations such because the Segway, the iBOT wheelchair, and the dishing out know-how used within the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine.
And it was there, whereas engaged on tasks like self-balancing wheelchairs and supply drones, that Lentini began to consider how automation might be used to make meals manufacturing extra environment friendly. He and a few coworkers began to debate the alternatives and began to think about what it may be wish to work on their very own mission beneath their very own firm.
The one query was, the place ought to they begin?
In keeping with Lentini, it was in 2020 that the idea for his or her first product began to come back collectively. Round that point, Lentini and his eventual co-founders have been standing in line for espresso and began to surprise what the explanation was for the lengthy wait occasions.
“After watching folks simply stroll away from the road after ready so lengthy, we have been like, ‘let’s poke and prod and see what’s actually occurring, what’s the largest downside behind the counter,’” mentioned Lentini in an interview with The Spoon.
After speaking to workers on the espresso store, they discovered that eggs have been usually the bottleneck within the kitchen because of how labor-intensive they’re to make. It was then they noticed a chance to innovate.
“That was the place we went down the rabbit gap of designing for restaurant homeowners,” Lentini mentioned.
Lentini took the primary leap. He left DEKA and commenced engaged on the thought, and inside just a few months, he acquired a small funding from an in depth good friend. Earlier than lengthy, he was joined by his different co-founders (Connor White, Keller Waldron, and Chris Plankey) and constructed their first prototype. This prototype helped them elevate a $2 million seed spherical in 2021 from Steve Papa, a longtime wi-fi trade govt and one of many unique buyers in Toast.
After two years of improvement, the corporate, now referred to as Bridge Home equipment, finalized its first product late final 12 months, a robotic designed to automate the preparation of eggs for breakfast sandwiches named OMM. Final month, the corporate was granted a utility patent for the know-how within the OMM, which covers the method of cooking an egg in an end-to-end vogue in a countertop equipment.
The OMM can put together two eggs in about two minutes, which implies a single machine can deal with roughly 60 eggs in an hour. The plan is to put the machines each at smaller mom-and-pop outlets which may solely make fifty eggs on a Saturday morning to higher-volume areas that do three to 5 hundred eggs in a day. These higher-volume areas, Lentini says, could have two or three machines working side-by-side.
Bridge Home equipment has arrange manufacturing within the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, space, they usually plan on rolling out the OMM to a set of trial clients over the subsequent few months. From there, the corporate plans to increase into different areas inside the US by the tip of 2024 and early 2025. The preliminary enterprise mannequin will probably be a “cooking-as-a-service” mannequin, and Lentini says Bridge will cost a nominal price on a per-egg-cooked foundation.
Together with his first merchandise heading out the door, Lentini can replicate on these early days working as a freshly graduated engineer for a know-how pioneer like Dean Kamen.
“A part of the explanation we wished to do that is that we simply noticed such a scarcity of innovation on this sector,” Lentini mentioned. “And we have been impressed by Dean’s curiosity and willingness to essentially attempt to do moonshots, and we actually wished to offer this a attempt to construct the primary form of end-to-end robotic home equipment.”
“And we went, and we tried it, and it labored out.”
You will get a peak on the OMM robotic egg cooker within the video beneath.
