Again in 2019, Benson Tsai determined to attend a meals robotics convention. The engineer had spent the final 5 years working for Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX, making use of what he had realized about battery know-how as a member of the technical employees for electrical car startup Lucid Motors to area journey, however now he had a obscure concept of launching a brand new startup that builds meals robots.
On the convention, he watched a panel on investing in robotics that featured enterprise investor Avidan Ross, the founding accomplice at Root Ventures. The 2 struck up a dialog and hit it off, and people early conversations led to Ross changing into Tsai’s first investor.
In these early days, Tsai thought possibly he’d construct an Asian meals robotic, principally as a result of he cherished Asian meals. Ultimately, although, he’d choose one other sort of meals: Pizza.
“I ended up taking a look at what made sense to automate,” Tsai instructed The Spoon in an interview this week.
Tsai started working on his robotic, hiring about 30 or so SpaceX engineers within the course of. He’d additionally increase heaps extra money past the preliminary $9 million funding led by Ross’s Root Ventures, the latest being a $16.5 million funding spherical led by Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures.
4 years and over $25 million in funding later, Stellar Pizza‘s meals robotic is prepared for motion and, over the previous few weeks, has been serving pizza on the campus of USC. The robotic heads to campus in a sprinter van, the place college students order pizza utilizing the Stellar Pizza app.
I requested Tsai if he’s serving meals from his robotic cellular meals truck, and he answered sure, he wouldn’t have it every other approach.
“I actually get pleasure from going out within the discipline,” stated Tsai. “I spent a number of time engaged on the loopy robots, and now I get to see folks chunk into the pizza, and it’s actually fulfilling.”
Tsai says to this point, issues are going fairly effectively. The Stellar Pizza van rolls onto campus 5 days per week, and already he’s seeing a lot of return clients.
“We’re at 45-50% return clients,” stated Tsai.
I requested him what the long-term imaginative and prescient is for the corporate and if he plans to license the know-how to a few of the greater pizza chains. He instructed me which may be within the playing cards sooner or later, however for now, he’s joyful constructing an end-to-end robotic pizza firm.
“Nothing is off the desk, however proper now, we’re chasing the imaginative and prescient of Stellar Pizza, particularly simply promoting pizzas as a result of, for one factor, constructing {hardware} that may make 100 completely different pizza recipes is definitely fairly exhausting. So we’re dogfooding and constructing our personal model, and if that’s profitable, possibly we’ll chase that.”
Tsai and his firm have come a good distance from these early days when he first attended that convention again in 2019; Stellar’s first product is within the discipline and joyful clients coming again for extra.
Oh, and that first convention? It was The Spoon’s Articulate, the first-ever meals robotics convention.
In the event you’d like to listen to Tsai inform the story of constructing his pizza robotic, join The Spoon’s subsequent meals robotics occasion, the Meals Robotics 2023 Outlook, a digital convention going down subsequent Wednesday.
