Zume Pizza technology is acquired by Flippy owner Miso
The robotics company will look to breathe new life into Zume after it shut down in 2023.
June 24, 2026
Three years after shutting down completely, former pizza robotics startup Zume is getting a second chance.
Miso Robotics, the parent company of Flippy the robot, has acquired Zume’s technology and intellectual property, including its hardware, software, and hundreds of patents. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The acquisition will allow Miso to extend its product line into pizza robots and add new features to Flippy based on some of Zume’s innovations.
“Pizza makes so much common sense [to automate], and yet nobody’s been able to crack it,” Miso CEO Rich Hull said. “We want to explore that.”
Pasadena, California-based Miso also sees value in Zume’s more than 300 patents, which range from robotics to clamshell hamburger packaging, as it looks to build a moat around its technology.
Founded in 2015, Zume Pizza was an early star in restaurant and delivery automation, with bold plans to automate pizza production from end to end, including baking pizza in vans en route to customers. That effort ultimately failed, in part due to the difficulties of cooking in a moving vehicle.
By 2018, Zume began to turn its focus to licensing its technology to other businesses. It raised $375 million from vaunted venture firm SoftBank at a reported $2.25 billion valuation. But it struggled to generate revenue, and in 2020, it got out of the pizza business and into compostable food packaging, marking the end of an era in restaurant robotics.
In 2023, Zume shut down, with plans to liquidate its assets, becoming a cautionary Silicon Valley tale. Other pizza robotics companies, including Piestro, Basil Street and, most recently, Picnic, have met a similar fate.
But according to Hull, Zume’s technology wasn’t the problem. The company was just too early, he said, part of a first wave of robotics companies that Miso hopes to improve upon and commercialize.
Because Zume raised so much capital, “the technology’s fantastic,” he said. “The market [for food automation] just wasn’t there.”
He believes there is a greater need for robots in the industry now because of how difficult it is for restaurants to find and afford labor.
To be clear, Miso does not plan to try cooking pizzas in vans, which was really only the last step in Zume’s production process. Hull said its robots can do everything from stretching the pizza dough to adding sauce, cheese and toppings, putting it in the oven, and boxing it up.
“Most of their technology is agnostic to the mobile aspect of what they do,” Hull said. “It’s really about the robotic preparation of food.”
Zume is Miso’s second acquisition this year following its purchase in February of Zignyl, an operations app that includes gamified performance incentives for employees. Miso rolled that into Zippy, an AI-powered mobile dashboard where operators can keep tabs on their restaurants.
It’s all part of a reset for Miso since 2023, when it landed a major investment from cleaning products supplier EcoLab and hired Hull. Since then, the CEO has worked to make it a more vertically integrated, one-stop shop tech provider, rather than just a hardware company.
Its core product is still Flippy, an automated frycook that Hull said can handle 90% of fry station labor while improving speed and consistency and reducing food waste. The company declined to reveal how many Flippys are in operation, but said the bot is now active in seven states. White Castle was an early customer.
Last year, it launched a new version of Flippy that is smaller and faster, based on feedback from restaurants.
Now it will add a pizza robot to its portfolio, and is looking for restaurant brands willing to help co-develop it.
“Part of what I hope will happen from this announcement and some of the other announcements we’ve made … is that people will go, ‘What’s up with Miso?’” Hull said. “‘Something interesting is happening over there.’”
About the Author
Joe Guszkowski
Senior editor, Restaurant Business
Joe Guszkowski is a senior editor with Restaurant Business covering technology and casual-dining chains.
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