Cookwala / Investors and partners
A free standard, a services business, a public good
For investors, entrepreneurs, philanthropies and development banks. This page describes the opportunity as we see it, the business model that keeps the standard free, the roadmap with a status on every item, the risks in plain words, and how governance works. It makes no financial promise and quotes no market size we did not measure.
The opportunity
Cooking machines are shipping or taking orders; general-purpose home robots are being sold on the promise of chores. None of them share a definition of "done" or "safe". The company that owns that definition owns a lot; the standard that gives it away gets adopted. Cookwala aims to be the second: the neutral, verifiable layer every maker can adopt, every regulator can point to, and every kitchen can use before robots.
Why now
Rules for a category are written in the first years; after that they are written by the incumbents. Product-safety and data-protection rules increasingly ask for the things this standard carries: safety functions a machine can show, audit logs, and data minimisation. No regulation references Cookwala. Food rescue needs a data standard today, with phones.
The business model
Two entities, as the action plan proposes: a foundation that holds the specification, the name and the mark, royalty-free forever; and a company (a public-benefit form fits) that sells services next to it:
- test-lab services: verified conformance runs and reports for device makers (certificates are issued by independent third parties under a scheme the foundation owns, never by the company);
- hub software and support for commercial kitchens;
- consented, credited datasets for robot learning, licensed with the contributors' terms;
- registry operations and namespace verification;
- pilots and integration for programs, where funders pay.
Free for relief use under the current licences: the Humanitarian Profile, the index, the tools. The foundation charter, when it exists, is what will bind this. Pricing of any service is not stated.
What legally exists today: a public repository and a domain. No company, no foundation, no contracts, no revenue. What is being raised, for what, and by whom is not stated here.
What exists, counted
The last tile is the honest one. Everything on this site is a specification, tools and a plan; nothing has been deployed. Impact, with sources.
Roadmap and gates
Now
- Core 0.2, profiles, SDKs, hub, MCP, recipes, site: done
- Professional reviews of envelopes and rule packs: planned
Next, gated
- Food-bank pilot: not yet funded; gate: partner and funding
- First device maker against the reference hub: gate: one maker agrees
- Agent-safety results per model: gate: runs published with method
- Steering committee: gate: three adopters or two implementations
Later
- Certification scheme with an independent certifier
- Neutral foundation; the mark moves with the trademark
- Contributor network with credit; consented datasets
Kill rules from the action plan: if two review rounds produce neither a device maker nor a pilot partner, Cookwala narrows to the Humanitarian Profile and the recipe format. If a pilot shows under a 5 % gain, results are published and the profile redesigned. The roadmap · The action plan with its concern register
Risks, in plain words
- Adoption. The market is early; a standard without implementers is a document.
- Correctness. Envelopes and rule packs are drafts awaiting professional review.
- Safety and liability. A data standard cannot prevent hardware failure or a maker that lies; certification is weaker than law.
- Privacy. Derived constraints can leak by inference; household consent is not one person's to give.
- Competition. Demand signals are gated on counsel.
- Dependence. One founder, one repository, one domain today.
- Platforms. Large makers may ship closed equivalents; the answer is to be the neutral layer they can adopt and to partner with open players.
- Hype. The ambition invites it; the rules against it are written down and will be tested.
Governance and how to engage
Decisions in public with written reasons; RFCs with 30-day comment periods; a steering committee with published numbers (51 % quorum, 7-day votes, one-third employer cap, two thirds for Core changes) and seats for food banks, a low- or middle-income country, labour, privacy and dietetics; a patent non-assertion pledge; critiques published with responses. Governance
- Fund a review (envelopes, rule packs, data protection) and get a published result
- Fund a pilot under the pre-registered protocol
- Back the services company, separated from the public good
- Join governance as a funder observer