Robot roti maker gets set to ship to U.S. backers who've waited 2 years
SINGAPORE -- It's kept pre-order customers waiting for two years, but the Rotimatic is finally ready to make its maiden voyage to U.S. buyers.
Singapore startup Zimplistic, which makes the robot roti-maker, started taking orders for its $999 kitchen appliance in 2014. Although fairly pricey, over 8,000 units were bought within a week and the company had to close orders to cope with demand.
The fully automated roti-maker takes flour, water and oil, and spits out fresh and hot rotis, unleavened Indian bread also known as chapati.
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Buyers in Singapore started getting their Rotimatics in June this year.
Pranoti Nagarkar, who co-founded Zimplistic and invented the Rotimatic, told Mashable she was grateful for the positivity the product received at launch, because it's tough waiting two years for a product, she acknowledged.
She hopes American buyers will react positively too, when the company starts shipping to them "in the fourth quarter" of this year. Rotimatic's Facebook page is peppered with impatient customer comments requesting updates on shipping, but posts from happy Singapore buyers should give folks in the U.S. renewed hope.
Rishi Israni, Zimplistic's CEO, who is also married to Nagarkar, noted that while the Singapore delivery was successful, the company is putting its all into the U.S. shipment, where the majority of the 8,000 orders are headed.
It's taken two years for the company to get its ducks in a row because of the testing and certifications required for hardware.
Over in a room, Nagarkar shows me a line of Rotimatics working all day, where some 2,000 rotis are made daily in order to test the machines' reliability.
"Yeah, it smells great and we're hungry all the time," she said with a laugh.
The anatomy of a perfect roti
In the eight years since Nagarkar cobbled the first Rotimatic prototype together, she's become quite the roti expert.
"The perfect roti has three layers, and it needs to puff up so the hot air can cook it from the inside," she said while tearing one roti apart.
And while making roti by hand seems simple, "you realize how complex humans are when you try to replicate that with a machine," said the mechanical engineer.
Making the ball of dough with the right proportion of ingredients is one step; kneading it properly is a separate complication (if, for examplef you overknead the dough it disintegrates, for example.
Israni, a software engineer who once sold a startup to McAfee, said the Rotimatic comes with an extra bit of brains to make its rotis closer to perfect.
The "kneading profile" of dough changes depending on a number of variables, from humidity to the protein component of the flour chosen. While a human can adapt on the fly from the feel and sight of the dough, a machine is less adaptable.
The Rotimatic's 15 sensors work to close this gap, and adjust to push out rotis of "at least 95 percent perfection" within five rotis, said Israni.
And by connecting to the internet, each Rotimatic joins a hive mind that shares its learnings with other Rotimatics.
It's been a fast acceleration for Zimplistic in the past year. When Mashable covered the Rotimatic in 2014, the company was a 20-person startup in Mountain View, California.
Today, the company tallies 85 employees, most of them hired in the past year.
Here's how the Rotimatic used to look before becoming the roti-making marvel it is now:
Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
