Technology startups typically have little problem creating a technology and a big problem convincing people to buy it.
Miso Robotics apparently has the opposite problem. The maker of Flippy the robot has plenty of demand from restaurants in a post-pandemic environment where labor costs are soaring and availability is a question mark.
“The QSR, the restaurant owners, they know they’re dealing with this current labor crisis,” Rich Hull, CEO of Miso, said at the ICR Conference on Wednesday. “They know it’s not going anywhere. They’re getting a ton of pressure.
“Everybody has to solve this problem and they need to solve it yesterday. So Miso has more demand than they can really do anything with right now.”
As such, Miso Robotics has some big plans to get its Flippy robot ready for the bigtime, plans that include a new version of the robot that can be “smaller, faster, cheaper to manufacture” and “100% reliable.” (“Nobody wants Flippy to go down during the lunch rush,” Hull said.)
The smaller robot, which the company calls “Flippy Next Gen,” will “solve all the remaining problems that Flippy has.” The new product will launch later this year, which will enable the company to meet all of this apparent demand for its product.
Miso Robotics has put its AI-powered robots into a number of restaurants. The robots make wings at Wing Zone and fries at White Castle and chips at Chipotle and pour drinks at Jack in the Box. A big investor in the company is the Minnesota-based Ecolab.
But the company is also planning to use the robots itself. Miso Robotics, along with tech company Cali Group and PopID, expect to open Cali Express next week. The restaurant will be “powered by Flippy” and will be what the owners say is the world’s first “fully automated restaurant.”
That restaurant has already generated a lot of attention for Miso Robotics. So has Flippy itself.
“Flippy makes for a great video,” Hull said. “Just do a Google search. There’s tens of thousands of videos and articles. Our customers love Flippy. There are Instagram accounts set up dedicated to Flippy. There are Flippy fan clubs. All kinds of chatboards set up just to talk about Flippy.”
Over the weekend, Hull said, Miso Robotics received a text from someone at a Jack in the Box location that has an all-Spanish speaking back-of-house staff. “They want to change the name to Felipe,” Hull said. “I think that’s pretty cool. Maybe we’ll end up doing that.”
But the company’s changes aren’t just about making Felipe, or Flippy, smaller and more reliable. They’re also about making the company more financially viable.
Miso Robotics has raised $125 million, mostly through equity crowdfunding, in which a company raises funds through larger groups of mostly small investors. Hull believes it is “the biggest success story in the history of equity crowdfunding.”
But he also suggested the company needs to think bigger. The amount of money the company has raised “puts you in this dangerous middle ground where you can raise enough money not to go bankrupt, but you can’t raise enough money to truly scale.”
Hull is now looking for institutional investors who will get a seat at the table in deciding the brand’s future. “That’s really interesting because now I get to go pick that guy,” he said.
Hull knows a thing or two about scaling brands. He for years led what would ultimately become Vix, the Spanish language streaming service. And he plans to bring that expansion sensibility to the food business.
“I think the future of food is one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen in my professional life,” Hull said. “I think it’s changing more than it ever has.”
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