• Geek RoboCook was founded in 2019 after its founders noticed Indian households still lacked smart kitchen technology that could truly save time
• The startup customised a smart electric pressure cooker specially designed for Indian recipes instead of simply reselling imported products
• What began as a household problem eventually grew into India’s first smart electric pressure cooker brand
Walk into any Indian home on a weekday morning, and the kitchen is already running. Someone is watching the pressure cooker, adjusting the flame, stirring a vessel, and tracking three things at once. It has always been this way. And for the longest time, nobody questioned it. A 2015 global survey found that Indian women were spending over 13.5 hours every week in the kitchen. More than double the global average of 6 hours. That number sat quietly in reports, and the appliance industry mostly ignored it. The same brands kept selling the same products. Nothing had meaningfully changed in decades. Two friends, Murugan Dhandapani and Prathap A, looked at this picture differently. What they saw inside their own homes every day became the reason Geek RoboCook exists today.
Murugan and Prathap had known each other for over 25 years. Murugan had an MBA and 17 years of corporate experience across FMCG, telecom, and internet companies. Prathap came with a strong engineering and management background. Both were doing well professionally. But something at home kept bothering them.
Their wives were spending a significant part of every day in the kitchen. Not by choice. Indian cooking simply demands it. You cannot walk away from a pressure cooker mid-whistle. Every dish needs presence, attention, and constant adjustment.
Murugan and Prathap felt that was unfair. And they started wondering if technology had any real answer for it.
The two friends began researching smart kitchen technology globally. What they found in American households surprised them. Smart electric pressure cookers had quietly become common across the USA. You added the ingredients, selected a program, and walked away. The cooker handled everything on its own. They got samples and tested them in their own Indian kitchens. Not for American recipes but for dal, rice, rajma, khichdi, and chole. Everything an Indian family actually eats daily. They needed to know if this technology could handle Indian food the same way.
It worked. Cooking time dropped by nearly 40 percent. The food came out well. And the person cooking did not have to stand over it at all. That was the moment everything became real.
Here is where most brands get it wrong. They see something working abroad, import it, put an Indian name on it, and wonder why it does not sell. Indian cooking is nothing like American cooking. The dishes are different, the ingredients are different, and the pressure requirements are different. A cooker built for pasta will not understand that a proper rajma needs a completely different setting. That gap is exactly where imported products fail.
Murugan and Prathap understood this before launching a single unit. They spent months customising the product for Indian recipes. They built preset menus for Indian dishes and tested every setting in real Indian kitchens. That work became the brand's biggest strength. It was not a foreign gadget with an Indian price tag. It was a foreign idea rebuilt entirely from scratch for Indian homes.
In 2019, Geek RoboCook launched with a trial batch of just 200 units on e-commerce. No massive marketing campaign. No celebrity face. Just a product the founders believed in, put in front of real customers, and waited. The response was stronger than expected. Over 1,200 content creator partnerships later, the brand had built a genuine community around smart cooking. Their content crossed 5 million views on YouTube simply because the product genuinely impressed people who tried it.
They also offered free doorstep after-sales service bookable through a simple WhatsApp message. No returning the product, no long waiting. Someone came home and fixed it. That kind of trust is not built through advertising. It is built through how a brand actually behaves.
Once RoboCook found its footing, Geek kept expanding. The Geek AiroCook came next, a large-capacity air fryer oven that could also grill, bake, and toast with 85 percent less oil. A category that barely existed in India before they built it. Then came premium rechargeable fans and smart locks. Every product followed the same thinking: find a real gap in Indian homes and solve it properly. Today, Geek's products have reached over 4.3 lakh homes across India. The brand has been named one of India's fastest-growing D2C companies for two years in a row. In 2025, they raised Rs 4 crore on the Tamil business reality show Startup Singam. The founders are now building Geek ARIA, an AI and IoT-powered kitchen ecosystem where appliances connect, communicate, and help families track their health through daily cooking.
But the real story of Geek RoboCook is simpler than any of that. Two friends noticed something unfair happening inside their own homes every single day and refused to accept that nothing could be done about it. They found a technology, rebuilt it for Indian kitchens, started with 200 units, and let the product speak.
Sometimes the most meaningful products are not the flashiest ones. They are the ones that quietly give people something they never thought to ask for. Their time back.
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