It is 7.40 in the evening in a Bengaluru flat, and dinner is the day’s last unsolved problem. The day has been long, the fridge holds half an onion and good intentions, and the food-delivery app is already open. Then a machine on the countertop takes over: the ingredients go into a steel jar, a screen lights up with the recipe for dal tadka, and the device chops, stirs, sautés and simmers while its owner finishes the last emails of the day. Dinner cooks itself — and it tastes like home.
The machine is the upliance 2.0+, built by upliance.ai, a Bengaluru startup founded in 2021 by IIT Bombay alumni Mahek Mody and Mohit Sharma. The company began with a problem familiar to millions of young Indians who have moved cities for work: they want real home food every day, but cooking after a long day takes time, skill and energy that are often in short supply. The founders’ answer was not another recipe app or a delivery service, but a device that does the cooking itself.
The device packs 14 automated cooking functions into one countertop machine: it chops, sautés, stirs, kneads, steams, blends and weighs ingredients, guided by an 8-inch touchscreen that walks the cook through each recipe step by step. Its library holds more than 750 recipes across 34 cuisines, from butter chicken and biryani to pasta and soups, with two new recipes added every Friday based on what owners are searching for. The latest version, upliance 2.0+, runs on the company’s HeatCore Gen 2 cooking system, with a glass lid so you can watch the food as it cooks, a Virtual Flame indicator that speaks in low, medium and high instead of degrees, and heating up to 160°C — hot enough for proper browning and roasting. A built-in weighing scale tracks macros for anyone counting protein, fat and carbs, and a manual mode hands full control back to the cook, kadhai-style.
Behind the hardware sits what the company calls Kitchen OS, powered by its proprietary UpAI engine. Paste a YouTube recipe link or a photograph of a handwritten family recipe, and the system turns it into guided, device-ready instructions with timings, temperatures and stirring cues. The device can be paused, resumed or stopped from a phone, and dietary modes cover high-protein, low-oil and kid-friendly meals. The same intelligence now powers a range of smart air fryers — 5L, 6L and a 12L oven — where Texture Control lets the cook pick juicy, tender, crispy or crunchy, and UpAI turns a food photo, a recipe reel or a YouTube link into cooking settings sent straight to the fryer.
Indian kitchens have taken to it in large numbers. The company’s own counter shows 6,68,617 meal sessions cooked on its devices since November 2022, with an average recipe rating of 4.34 from more than 1,08,191 owner ratings. The company says it has served more than 10,000 customers since its commercial launch in 2023, and the business is growing fast: revenue rose 186% to more than ₹6 crore in FY25, up from ₹2.17 crore a year earlier, and the company is targeting ₹16 crore this fiscal year, with profitability in sight in FY27. The devices are built locally, and the team keeps improving them through WhatsApp cooking groups where owners share feedback and the recipe team responds within hours.
The backing matches the ambition. upliance.ai has raised ₹41 crore from investors including Rukam Capital, Khosla Ventures, Draper Associates, Nithin Kamath-led Rainmatter Fund and Stanford Angels, alongside cofounders of Ather Energy and Unacademy, and has invested more than ₹7 crore in core R&D. Reports in early November said the company is in talks to raise $3–4 million in a Series A round, with Khosla Ventures expected to take part. For a country where the daily question of what to cook has quietly become one of the biggest frictions of urban life, a Bengaluru machine that answers it — in 34 cuisines, in nine Indian languages, with the taste of home intact — is a small revolution sitting on the kitchen counter.
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