Khosla Ventures Backed upliance.ai Launches AI-Powered 12L Smart Oven

Smart appliances startup upliance.ai has launched a 12L Smart Air Fryer Oven, marking the startup’s expansion beyond its existing 5L and 6L personal-sized air fryers into the large-family cooking segment. 

The launch is aimed at urban households looking to upgrade their kitchen appliances for everyday, full-scale cooking rather than occasional use.

Featuring an AMOLED touchscreen interface, the 12L format is designed to cook multiple dishes simultaneously and deliver consistent results across meals. Instead of importing pre-built units or white-labelling designs from global original design manufacturers (ODMs), upliance.ai said it has designed, engineered, and built the hardware, firmware, and custom electronics in India as its own proprietary intellectual property (IP).

“Everybody has access to what the ODMs build. If you buy an off-the-shelf design, you are selling the same box as everyone else with a different colour and logo on top,” upliance.ai cofounder Mahek Mody told Inc42.

According to Mody, the startup’s in-house approach enabled it to develop ‘Texture Control’, a software layer that replaces the traditional time-and-temperature settings, which often result in inconsistent cooking outcomes. 

“A home cook doesn’t think in degrees, so they set it to max because that is what ‘frying’ means in their head,” Mody explained, adding that this approach often causes the food to burn on the outside while remaining undercooked inside. 

The software automatically adjusts the internal heat levels based on the selected texture profile, helping moisture-rich foods like broccoli, carrots, and paneer retain their texture and moisture instead of turning them dry or rubbery. 

Building A Claude Code For Cooking

To power its precise-cooking capability, the appliance relies on the startup’s unified kitchen OS, which features a context-aware AI cooking assistant. Rather than comparing it with general-purpose AI models such as ChatGPT or Gemini, the startup likens its targeted AI architecture to “Claude Code for food”.

“The analogy we use is Claude Code, not ChatGPT or Gemini; we are basically Claude Code for food,” Mody said.

“Our AI agent has real context about the device. It knows exactly how much power it has and the geometry of the cooking area.”

Priced at ₹15,999, the platform utilises data from lakhs of previous domestic cooking sessions across the brand’s network to refine its parameters. For instance, when a user uploads a photo of a dish mid-cook through the app, the AI analyses surface browning and adjusts the heating to achieve the desired texture. 

The underlying cooking algorithms are continuously updated via over-the-air updates, with major system upgrades rolled out two to three times a year.

From Personal Cooking To Family Meals 

Alongside software-driven insights, user data also showed limitations in cooking capacity. The shift to a 12L oven format was driven by consumer usage patterns gathered after the launch of the startup’s 5L and 6L models in February 2026. 

While the smaller units maintained a 4.8-star rating on Amazon, data showed that users were frequently trying to push the small baskets to their limits by baking complex recipes and whole-roasting. 

This trend was largely driven by younger urban professionals chasing the food they see on social media, only to be let down by the inconsistent results conventional time and temperature controls give them.  

The 12L model was designed to address both capacity constraints and the margin for user error. Functioning as a full-fledged oven, it features a rotating skewer, a rotating basket, and multiple tray levels, allowing users to cook multiple dishes simultaneously.

Following the launch, upliance.ai—which raised a seed round led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Rukam Capital, Draper Associates, and Rainmatter—is looking past traditional retail metrics and is targeting 1 Mn cooking sessions within six months. 

The new product can be ordered through upliance.ai’s website, Amazon, and selected offline retail partners. 

The post Khosla Ventures Backed upliance.ai Launches AI-Powered 12L Smart Oven appeared first on Inc42 Media.