Restaurants are struggling with rising costs and vanishing margins. Josef Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kaikaku, believes automation can save the industry – by freeing humans up to deliver real hospitality again.Kaikaku’s “restaurant in a box” uses robotics, vision systems and nutritional data to make fresh, personalised food at scale. Josef shows Harriet how Kaikaku’s robotic kitchens, proprietary OS and AI system “Alesia” make it possible to serve fresh food at speed – and why the UK is the perfect place to build hardware for a new food economy.We talk:- Why restaurant chains can’t afford real food — and how Kaikaku can fix it- “No future-proofing”: building tech fast in real environments- How robots and humans collaborate in the kitchen- What AI-driven nutrition could mean for public health- Why the UK is a hardware powerhouse againCheck out Kaikaku:https://kaikaku.ai/https://www.linkedin.com/company/kaikaku-ai/https://www.linkedin.com/in/josef-chen/More on Basis:https://www.buildbasis.com/https://www.youtube.com/@BasisCapitalhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/basiscapitalltd/https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrietsgreen/
Isembard’s machine shops bring together hardware and software to reshore, meet critical demand and reindustrialise economies – while also redefining blue-collar work. Isembard’s Shaun Rowcliffe and Andrew Kramer give Harriet a tour of their Exeter site, and talk about decentralising manufacturing, moving at pace and transforming define as a sector.We talk:How Isembard is democratising manufacturingThe perks and challenges of running your own factoryWhere apprenticeships can democratise educationHow an agile model can transform the manufacturing processWhat needs to happen outside of government to transform the defence sectorCheck out Isembard:https://www.isembard.com/https://www.linkedin.com/company/isembard/franchise@isembard.comMore on Basis:https://www.buildbasis.com/https://www.youtube.com/@BasisCapitalhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/basiscapitalltd/https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrietsgreen/
Science Machine is building an AI data scientist for biotech – one that can reason like a scientist and collapse development timelines. CTO and co-founder Ben Tenmann joins Harriet to talk about democratising drug discovery, the broken economics of R&D, why universities are obsolete and what it means to build when growth has stalled.
Artificial Societies simulates your world. The 2025 YC team is helping companies like Anthropic and 11x predict what their customers will do before they do it. CEO James sits down with Harriet to chat democracy, journalling, Mars, 996 and free will.