How Upliance Is Solving India’s Biggest Everyday Cooking Pain Point

Thomas Friedman’s flat world was more of a metaphor when the bestseller came out in the early 2000s. Some 20 years on, it’s an undeniable reality, if you see how people move places.  

In fact, one in every three Indians changed their place of residence during 2020-2021, posting one of the highest migration rates globally. Youth migrate for better education, professionals for career opportunities, and a significant share of women change cities after their marriage. 

The change of place brings inevitable shifts, some challenging, some unexpectedly rewarding. Whether it’s cooking after long hours, managing growing workplace pressures, or simply staying on your toes in an unfamiliar city, professionals living away from home often find their work–life balance stretched thin, regardless of gender.

Then how do we strike a balance all over again? 

Tech helps. uplilance.ai, a startup, brings an AI-powered personal device that can cook over 750 dishes in 34 cuisines without any supervision. The devices can chop, saute, stir, weigh ingredients, and guide the user step-by-step to complete meals and simplify the process of ‘real cooking’ so that a beginner or a novice can also learn confidently and experience home cooking without compromising on either taste or time. 

“Just choose your meal, follow the instructions on the screen, feed it with ingredients, and your food will be ready within minutes,” Mahek Mody, an IIT-Bombay graduate who founded upliance.ai along with fellow alumnus Mohit Sharma, told Inc42.

upliance.ai came up in 2021 and claims to have completed more than 6 Lakh meals on its device till date. The startup’s topline jumped 186% to exceed INR 6 Cr in FY25, up from INR 2.17 Cr a year earlier. 

The startup has recently rolled out an upgrade, upliance 2.0, that delivers 40% faster cooking times, diet-friendly recipe variants, macro-tracking, smarter motor control, and more. 

Mody claimed that upliance.ai has been able to garner strong traction in metro and Tier I cities, including Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, and Chennai, while there’s growing demand from urban hubs such as Pune, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, and Kochi. 

The startup’s core customers are the urban nuclear households, working couples, and single dwellers who want to eat real, home-cooked food but have limited time, skills, and mental bandwidth for daily cooking.

“Our customers value taste, nutrition and convenience in the same meal, and see upliance as a way to keep home food a consistent part of their lifestyle and not just something reserved for weekends or special occasions,” Mody said. 

upliance.ai competes directly with the likes of Nosh and Wonderchef’s Chef Magic, but Mody believes their primary competition is food ordering apps, not smart cooking appliance companies. “We predominantly replace people ordering outside food with having people cook at home.” 

The startup has raised INR 41 Cr from a clutch of investors like Rukam Capital, Khosla Ventures, Draper Associates, Nithin Kamath-led Rainmatter Fund, Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs India, as well as undisclosed cofounders of Ather Energy and Unacademy.

Automated Cooking Gets More Personal

The Bengaluru-based startup had launched upliance1.0 with the promise of making cooking simpler through guided recipes and automation. The device could chop, stir, and sauté with precision, but as users began using it regularly, the team discovered that technology alone couldn’t win over the soul of Indian cooking.

Indian kitchens are intense environments full of heat, oil, spices, and unpredictability. Many users found that the hardware struggled with sustained high temperatures and oil-heavy cooking. 

“The users mentioned that they felt disconnected when they couldn’t see or sense what was happening inside. Cooking, they pointed out, is not just about the end result – it’s about the process, watching onions brown, listening to spices crackle, and judging when to stir or stop. With upliance1.0, users missed that connection,” Mody said. 

The upliance team decided to work on these insights to give shape to upliance 2.0. The engineers realised that customers didn’t just want a faster machine, but something that could be as intuitive as a kadhai, a versatile cooking pot used across Indian kitchens. They had to maintain the speed of the appliance without the customers feeling ‘out of control’ as many of them mentioned in their WhatsApp communities, Mody said. 

upliance.ai invested months redesigning and modifying both the hardware and the software. It introduced a glass lid so the user could see the food cooking. Though small, this modification solved for visibility, familiarity, and allowed home chefs the mental comfort of knowing exactly what stage the dish was at. 

The second upgrade was Virtual Flame, a heat indicator that replaced temperature readings with something every Indian cook understands – low, medium, and high flames. This makes upliance 2.0 much more handy and intuitive. 

upliance 2.0 also comes with a re-engineered cooking system that can handle the demand of Indian cooking. The new version heats up to 160°C, enough for proper browning and roasting, something the first model struggled with. 

A smarter motor control helps in better chopping and stirring consistency, and a built-in weighing scale tracks macros for those counting protein, fat, and carbs. The new device has a manual mode that gives the user full control by simulating kadai control on the device (a dial to turn heat levels and the virtual flame reflecting the same.) 

The upliance 2.0 software picks up on what people cook every day. With a base library of over 750 recipes, upliance AI studies cooking patterns at scale – which dishes are repeated weekly, where users drop off, what they rate highly, and which new cuisines they are exploring. This improves the taste of recipes over time and also improves recommendations, which eventually lead the users to cook at home more often. Every Friday, two new recipes are added based on search trends and community demand. And when the users share feedback in their WhatsApp cooking groups, the recipe team responds in real time, fixing any issues within hours. 

This closed loop of data, feedback, and iteration has helped upliance.ai to shape what it calls Kitchen OS, powered by its proprietary UpAI engine. With this, users can paste a YouTube recipe link or a handwritten family recipe, and the system will turn it into guided, device-ready instructions with timings, temperatures, and stirring cues. 

The device can also be controlled using a smartphone application. The user can pause, resume, or stop cooking remotely. The company has also added dietary modes for high-protein, low-oil, kid-friendly meals to address the diversity of Indian eating habits.

AI Helps Cook At Home More Often 

Mody made it clear that upliance.ai does not plan to replace other appliances in the market but to get more Indians to cook at home. 

“Our goal is simple: get more Indians cooking at home, more often. If that means one device that becomes the centre of the kitchen, we’ll build it. If it means new tools, new formats or new experiences that remove friction from cooking, we’ll build those too,” he said. 

This ambition comes with its own set of operational demands. Scaling a kitchen-tech product in India means synchronising everything, from manufacturing and supply chain to recipe development, software updates and customer support. 

Mody shared that the company has chosen to keep the pieces tightly integrated. The devices are built locally, users get direct support, and the software is updated continuously in the background. The idea is to improve the experience without asking people to change the way they cook. The technology lifts the burden, instead of reshaping the habit.

When asked about the company’s near-term growth projections, Mody shared a confident outlook for upliance.ai. “We are looking to grow 2-3 times in revenue year-on-year for the next two years so that EBITDA hits positive numbers in FY27.” The startup looks to close this fiscal (FY26) with an INR 16 Cr revenue, making an almost 160% rise. 

Rukam Capital, which backed upliance.ai since its pre-launch phase and supported them with product feedback, market strategy, and strategic capital allocation, also have a positive outlook on the startup’s current financials. 

But, as all projections point to revenue growth and a potential move into profitability over the next couple of years, the startup’s main priority still remains improving the technology.

“At this seed stage, profitability is not our focus. Growth and getting India cooking at home is where we are looking to be. We are investing more in R&D and capex to make unit economics three years down the line our primary competitive advantage,” Mody told Inc42. The cofounder also shared that upliance has invested over INR 7 Cr in core R&D activities to date. 

The business recipe of upliance rests on a 19% average growth rate, driving the $20.9 Bn global smart kitchen appliances market to more than $84 Bn by 2031. India, home to the world’s largest number of youths with a thriving digital economy, grows in sync from $3.1 Bn to $4.3 Bn by 2028. It remains to be seen if the AI edge of upliance.ai can steer that momentum in urban India.