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Stanford Engineers Team Up With Michelin-Star Chef To Build Modular Restaurants (techcrunch.com)28
Stanford engineers Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele and Max Perham paired up with Michelin-star chef Eric Minnich to start Mezli, a company building fully autonomous modular restaurants. TechCrunch reports:Mezli's prototype robot restaurant is making a minority of the bowls served to customers and is supplemented by a human-powered kitchen. It is up and running and serving customers from the company's KitchenTown location in San Mateo. The machines take up a 10-foot by 20-foot space and are freestanding. They are loaded with ingredients, initially offering Mediterranean-style grain bowls, side dishes and drinks. The bowls start at $6.99. Diners can order directly from the restaurant or order online and pick up the food or have it delivered. The test location is already showing promise: 44% of customers who have tried the food have become repeat customers, Kolchinski said.
The company is now working on its third version of its prototype that will be ready for a public launch next year, he said. That momentum is backed by a $3 million seed round from investors including Metaplanet, roboticist Pieter Abbeel, restaurateur Zaid Ayoub and Y Combinator. That new funding will enable the company to add more talent, parts, food and operational expenses. Once the company can scale, Mezli will be able to mass produce thousands of the modular restaurants and deploy them in a fraction of the time and money it takes for traditional restaurants to get up and running, Kolchinski added. "We will be scaling up to a few locations and then mass producing them," he said. "We expect to hit 1,000 locations faster than other restaurants due to our mass production method."
The company is now working on its third version of its prototype that will be ready for a public launch next year, he said. That momentum is backed by a $3 million seed round from investors including Metaplanet, roboticist Pieter Abbeel, restaurateur Zaid Ayoub and Y Combinator. That new funding will enable the company to add more talent, parts, food and operational expenses. Once the company can scale, Mezli will be able to mass produce thousands of the modular restaurants and deploy them in a fraction of the time and money it takes for traditional restaurants to get up and running, Kolchinski added. "We will be scaling up to a few locations and then mass producing them," he said. "We expect to hit 1,000 locations faster than other restaurants due to our mass production method."
