This Company Received $375 Million to Have Robots Make More Pizzas

Everywhere you go around the world, you will find tons of pizza places. In some countries, they even have their own original pizza flavor. Despite being an original delicacy from Italy, pizza has become widely known worldwide for being versatile.

The original way to make pizza is by manually kneading and forming a dough before flattening it up then put whatever toppings are available. However, a company which is known as Zume Pizza let robots take over the pizza station and let them make the pizzas instead.

Pizza Made By Robots

This food delivery startup was introduced two years ago around the San Francisco Bay Area. They have been delivering pizzas that are made by robots all over California. Technically, it is only robot-assisted since they are the ones pressing the dough.

What makes them really special is that they are known to be the first ones to get help from robots when it comes to making pizzas. It turns out that these robots can press the dough perfectly in just a matter of nine seconds. This then allows the entire pizza-making process to be more efficient and it takes less time for humans to complete the job. According to its founder and CEO Julia Collins, one of the reasons why they decided to pursue this business using robots is that they want to identify places wherein they believe humans were considered overtaxed physically.

One of those things is having to stick their hands inside a 600-degree oven for a couple of hours every single day.

As of 2017, there are 3 billion pizzas being sold all over the United States every single year and Americans eat about 350 slices per second.

One of their robots’ name is Doughbot, who is currently deployed on the company’s “robot-enabled pizza assembly line”. Doughbot’s job is to press pizza dough every single day and does it about five times faster than any professional pizza maker can.

Zume Pizza gets their industrial machines from ABB, and they put each robot in different tasks such as removing pizzas from the oven once they’re cooked, spreading the sauce on the dough and more. Most people don’t really like the idea since it is like robots are taking over what should be a job for people. However, Collins said that one of their goals is to achieve on-route cooking as well as robotic automation. This way, they could cut costs and have a faster service for the people. So far, they have about six deliver trucks that are roaming around California to deliver pizza.

Zume’s Latest Investment

Collins said that they predict what kind of pizzas people will order and how much they will sell that day. That is because they don’t want to make pizzas from scratch, but at the same time not wanting to be a fast food chain. Since they are looking to expand, it was also reported that they recently received $375 million of backing from SoftBank.

They are actually a tech investment firm that backs up businesses like this and usually the funds come from the company’s vision fund. This fund is reported to be worth more than a hundred billion dollars, and is even backed up by another investment fund from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Zume Pizza reportedly received the money from an unnamed investor, this is all according to a report from Wall Street Journal. However, additional reports say that another $375 million will be invested, which will then lead to the company being worth more than $2 billion.

Since they just started two years ago, Zume Pizza is currently only accessible in some areas in California like Mountain View, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Menlo Park, and Atherton. They are looking to branch out in the next few years.

Each robot that makes the pizza cost between $25,000 to $35,000. ABB, which is a global manufacturer of robots, plans to make more if ever Zume continues to expand their business. According to Zume’s founder and CEO, they are also planning on getting delivery trucks that contain remote-controlled ovens so the pizzas will be fired up as they go. This will prevent them to prepare food while the trucks are on the road.