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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Behind the Bot

Kiwibot Partners with Sodexo to Roll Out Delivery Robots at the University of Denver

Kiwibot announced today that it has partnered with foodservice company Sodexo to bring robot food delivery to students, faculty and staff at the University of Denver.

Starting today, a fleet of 15 Kiwibots will be available to deliver food from Monday to Friday between the hours of 8 a.m and 6 p.m., with deliveries costing a flat $2.50 per order. Delivery will start with one campus restaurant before expanding to four more food options by mid-October. Kiwibot is also working with the city of Denver to enable off-campus deliveries at some point in October, as well.

There are a few things worth noting about this deal. First, this is Kiwi’s second bite at the apple when it comes to college delivery. Last year, the company delivered to UC Berkeley and had big plans to expand to a number of different schools across the U.S. Those plans never came to fruition, however and were abandoned. One reason that growth might not have happened last year was that Kiwibot was going through student groups, and not partnering with a school’s administration.

This time around, Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo, a huge company that provides foodservice to colleges across the U.S. This partnership brings with it more legitimacy for Kiwibot, and also provides an entrée, so to speak, with college administrations and restaurants at potential campuses.

That Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo is in itself interesting because Sodexo has an existing partnership with Kiwi rival, Starship, for robot deliveries on various colleges like George Mason University. The difference, however, is that Starship’s program requires users to download the Starship app. Kiwibot’s solution is more of a B2B play, and will integrate with a food ordering app from Sodexo. So it could provide Kiwibot with direct access to a greater number of Sodexo-run properties, should the partnership grow.

Kiwibot have been on a bit of a, err, roll lately. In July the company launched a restaurant delivery program in the city of San Jose, CA. Kiwibot is also in the middle of an equity crowdfunding campaign, which aims to raise $1 million.

Tortoise Unveils its Not-Autonomous Grocery Delivery Robot

Up to now, San Francisco-based Tortoise has mostly been known for its technology that helps manage micro-mobility fleets like electric scooters and bikes. But earlier this week the company took to Twitter to unveil its new line of business: delivery robots.

But Tortoise is setting itself apart from other players like Starship and Kiwi that are already in the robot delivery space. First off, the slow-moving Tortoise, roughly the size of an electric wheelchair, is bigger than a rover bot and can carry 100-plus pounds. It’s not meant for on-demand delivery of burritos or lattes, but rather for making scheduled deliveries of groceries, parcels and other goods within a three mile radius of a store or hub.

Second, and perhaps more intriguing, is the fact that Tortoise robots are not autonomous. There are teleoperators who drive each Tortoise remotely. This manual control, according to the Tortoise rep I spoke with by phone this week, will allow the company to get to market and scale faster that other delivery robots.

It’s not hard to see why. While the idea of a fleet of self-driving robots is very cool, it can also come with some very real-world problems. Last fall, Starship’s robots had to pause deliveries in Pittsburgh after complaints of the robot blocking the sidewalk entrance of a person in a wheelchair. And based on this guest post in TechCrunch last month, robots have still not fully adapted to be disability friendly.

With a human at the Tortoise wheel, so to speak, the robots can stop, reverse and in general avoid incidents that could impact pedestrian and property safety. So having teleoperators could make city and local governments more amenable to Tortoise bots scurrying around on public sidewalks.

Needing one human to operate one Tortoise at at a time seems like it could be a barrier to scaling. However, the Tortoise rep told me that eventually, driving robots could operate like a call center, with drivers around the world, or Tortoise could become a gig-economy platform where people stay at home and play what is essentially a real-world videogame, driving the robots around. Though I can’t imagine it would pay all that well.

Tortoise’s business model is to flat-out lease robots to customers who would be responsible for storing and charging the robots. Tortoise would do maintenance as needed and control the driving platform to get deliveries to their destination. The company already has one bulk food delivery company as a customer with more retail partner announcements to come.

Tortoise is launching at a time when interest in delivery robots is accelerating. The pandemic has restaurants and retailers looking for ways to reduce human-to-human transmission. In addition to providing contactless delivery, Tortoise robots won’t get sick.

But Tortoise is also an example of how thinly sliced the delivery robot market is getting. You have the small rover bots of Starship and Kiwi, the larger bike lane-driving robots of Refraction, and the even larger pod-like vehicles of Nuro. By eschewing restaurant delivery and focusing on bigger grocery deliveries, Tortoise is carving out its own, more narrow niche.

Tortoise may not have been first in the delivery robot race, but it’s focus could speed it to front-runner status soon enough.

Saga Robotics Raises €9.5M for its UV Light Ag Robot

Saga Robotics, which makes an autonomous robotic platform for agriculture, announced this week that it has raised €9.5 million Euros (~$11.35 million USD). Hortidaily writes that the investment was led by Nysnø Climate Investments with ADM Capital Europe and the Rabo Food & Agri Innovation Fund, with participation from other Norwegian investors.

The Saga Robotics’ platform, dubbed “Thorvald,” is modular and can accomplish a number of different tasks on a farm. We recently wrote about how its UV-light capabilities are being used to kill off mildew on crops without the use of pesticides. According to the Saga Robotics website, Thorvald is also capable of “picking fruits and vegetables, phenotyping, in-field transportation, cutting grass for forage, spraying and data collection/crop prediction.”

Saga’s funding comes at a time when robotics are poised to play a more central role in our agriculture system. In traditional agriculture, farm workers often have to deal with extreme temperatures and other environmental conditions and hazards. The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated and worsened these issues by impacting the flow of labor and becoming a source of outbreaks because of the cramped working conditions.

Robots can potentially help alleviate some of the stresses on farms. In addition to being able to work around the clock and in extreme heat, robots also also don’t get sick and reduce vectors for human-to-human disease transmission.

Saga is among a wave of robotics companies working on agricultural solutions. Small Robot Company, Farmwise, Advanced Farm Technologies, and Augean Robotics are just some of the companies coming to market with automated farm solutions.

Beastro is a Robot for Ghost Kitchens

As the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more people into ordering delivery from restaurants, the restaurant industry has responded by opening more ghost kitchens. And with more restaurants ditching the front of house for smaller-format, delivery-only operations, the logical next step is to automate as much of that new format as possible, which is now starting to happen.

Last week, Tel Aviv-based Kitchen Robotics unveiled the Beastro, a robotic ghost kitchen. The Beastro is an industrial-looking standalone kiosk that acts as a fully automated kitchen. The Beastro is 11 ft. 6 in. by five ft. 10 in. wide and 7 ft 2 inches tall, weighing in a 1,790 lbs. It can make 45 dishes an hour including Italian and Asian cuisines, as well as soups, salads and more. The Beastro starts at $5,990 a month.

As you can see from this promotional video, the Beastro is reminiscent of the Spyce Kitchen, with a series of grippers, conveyors and dispensers. The machine places all ingredients in a bowl, then mixes and heats the dishes, presumably through induction.

Beastro™ by Kitchen Robotics

The smarts of the Beastro is in Kitchen Robotics’ cloud-based Cuismo software. Cuismo manages the programming and monitoring of each dish made, allows for customization and, according to the company, uses deep learning and predictive analysis to reduce operational costs, though it doesn’t say exactly how. Cuismo also integrates with third-party delivery services. The base Cuismo software package is free for a single site. Prices jump to $249/month for up to five different sites and $999/month for an unlimited number of sites.

Beastro is arriving at an opportune time. Euromonitor recently predicted that the ghost kitchen market will hit $1 trillion by 2030 (read our Spoon Plus deep dive market report on ghost kitchens to learn more). Because ghost kitchens are built around delivery, the whole point of them is to get meals prepped and ready quickly, something a robot like Beastro can do around the clock, without taking breaks or, more relevant for our times, calling in sick.

Of course, automating ghost kitchens also brings up the societal issues around labor. If a prolonged pandemic means that ghost kitchens become the dominant venue for restaurants to exist, where will those line and prep cooks go once robots are installed? Not every restaurant brand or ghost kitchen will adopt automation, but what we do with displaced restaurant workers is something we need to deal with.

Kitchen Robotics’ told The Spoon that has received more than $1 million in funding from various investors and CEOs in the industry and that Beastro will be deployed in two major U.S. cities by mid-December of this year.

 

Simbe Robotics CEO: Robots Help Prevent Empty Grocery Store Shelves

Can robots help prevent the empty grocery store shelves that we saw during the initial panic buying stage of this pandemic? Brad Bogolea, Co-Founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics, thinks so.

Simbe makes Tally, an autonomous shelf-scanning robot that roams grocery store aisles and uses computer vision and RFID to keep tabs on inventory. Simbe says Tally can spot inventory anomalies and provide analytics about purchasing and re-stocking insights.

Because Tally is a robot, it can spend its day going up and down aisles, giving store managers ongoing updates about product inventory. It is this near-real time snapshot of a store that Bogolea says can help retailers thwart outages during panic-buying sprees like the one we saw earlier in 2020, and also provide a better e-commerce buying experience for consumers.

Tally is currently being used in trials by grocers like Schnuck’s and Giant Eagle, as well as other partners across six countries. “We’ve had insights related to consumption patterns on shelves,” Bogolea told me by phone this week, “Especially in peak panic buying.”

Bogolea said the problem stores experienced during this panic buying was bad supply chain data. “Many of these stores operate on a replenishment system,” said Bogolea. He explained that “if there’s heavy distortion, retailers may assume a positive balance on-hand,” even though the products actually aren’t there.

The bad supply chain data, according to Bogolea, is a result of the manual inventory checks that stores currently carry out. If robots are used, shelf inventory count is more accurate and up to the minute (basically) because the robots can run multiple shelf audits throughout the day. More accurate data means that stores can respond faster when there is a sudden run on particular products to speed up replenishment.

But robots aren’t just helpful dealing with sudden pandemic buying. As the pandemic pushes people into record amounts of grocery e-commerce, there is a greater need for what the consumer sees online to match the availability in store. Anyone who’s ordered groceries online is familiar with ordering a basket of groceries only to get notifications prior to pickup or delivery that, whoops, that item was actually out of stock.

Bogolea said an additional benefit of using shelf-scanning robots is that they can free up human workers to do other tasks such as picking items for online orders and sanitizing the store and carts.

Simbe is not the only company making shelf-scanning robots. Walmart is expanding the use of Bossa Nova’s robots to 1,000 stores, and Woodman’s Markets is using Badger Technologies’ robots at its locations throughout the midwest.

Bogolea said that since the pandemic Simbe has seen an uptick in the amount of inbound interest in Tally. But despite all the promises of his company’s technology, Bogolea is the first to admit that adopting it is not like flipping a switch.

“Though there is stronger interest,” Bogolea said, “There’s a lot of work to deploy this type of technology.” As we learned from Albertsons at our Articulate food robotics summit last year, grocery stores, especially big chains, only adopt solutions that are already at scale.

Simbe has its own plans to scale up and build 1,000 robots over the coming year. Between it and all the other robotic players in the space, there’s a good chance you’ll be passing one in the grocery aisle in the not too distant future.

Pudu Robotics Raises $15M in Series B+ Round

Chinese delivery robot company Pudu Robotics (aka Pudu Tech) announced this week that it has completed a Series B+ round of nearly $15 million in funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital China with participation from existing investors Meituan, Everwin Investment, QC Capital, and Chengbohan Fund.

Pudu makes self-driving restaurant server robots equipped with racks of trays that can shuttle plates of food and empty dishes to and from the kitchen.

This B+ funding comes on the heels of Pudu Robotics’ Series B fundraise of $15 million, which the company announced on July 1 of this year. The B+ round brings the total amount of announced funding raised by Pudu to roughly $30 million. (Crunchbase lists prior Series A, Seed and Angel rounds of undisclosed amounts.)

According to today’s press announcement, Pudu’s robots have been sold to more than 20 countries and regions around the world. Earlier this month, Pudu announced that the Muhguri restaurant is Sokcho, South Korea now had 11 Pudu robots serving food to customers.

Pudu is certainly not alone in creating a new robotic labor force for restaurants. Other players in the space include fellow Chinese company Keenon Robotics, California-based Bear Robotics, and South Korea’s Woowa Bros., which has partnered with LG for server bots.

Pudu said this latest funding would be used to expand its market. The money is coming just as the global pandemic has restaurants reassessing their dine-in businesses. Server robots like Pudu’s remove one possible vector of human-to-human viral transmission, and come with the added benefit of not getting sick themselves.

While that may be good news in terms of not spreading the coronavirus, the increased use of robots means fewer jobs for humans. A recent survey from Aaron Allen & Associates found that more than 80 percent of restaurant jobs could be automated, with the majority of them being server positions.

That stat, of course, brings up a host of other societal issues, but right now, most people are pre-occupied with the more immediate pandemic-related problems.

Saladworks to Use Chowbotics’ Salad Making Robot for Market Expansion

Fast casual restaurant chain Saladworks announced today that it will be using Chowbotics’ Sally robot to expand into hospitals, universities and grocery stores. According to the press release, the Sally machines will feature Saladworks’ branding and exclusively carry menu items from Saladworks’ menu.

This deal actually makes a lot of sense. First, Sally is compact, coming in at only 3 ft. x 3 ft. This means the robot can be installed almost anywhere, and that Saladworks can extend its brand into high-traffic areas without needing to build out a full store. Plus, vending machines like Sally can run 24 hours a day.

Second, during this pandemic, restaurants (and consumers) have been looking for ways to reduce the amount of human-to-human contact involved in day-to-day foodservice operations. Not only does the Sally robot make the salads sans humans, it also keeps all of its 22 fresh ingredients sealed away in chambers which are themselves sealed up behind glass. Customers can literally see where their order is coming from as it is dispensed.

Finally, and some might say this is the most important thing, Sally makes a good salad. All the convenience and COVID-19 protections in the world don’t make a difference if no one wants to eat what you’re making.

One item of particular note in the press announcement is how Saladworks is targeting grocery stores in its go-to market. Prior to the pandemic, retailers were not too keen on robotic vending services like Sally because they were redundant to what grocery stores already offered. But as the coronavirus has grocery stores removing things like salad bars, those vending machines become more attractive. Just last month, ShopRite partnered with Chowbotics to put a Sally in its Carteret, NJ store. Having the Saladworks brand, which is probably more well known in certain geographic areas than Chowbotics, on the machine and the Saladworks menu could entice more people to try it out.

This is the second such restaurant partnership for Chowbotics, which previously partnered with SaladStation to roll out 50 Sally robots across seven states.

It’s not hard to imagine that Chowbotics has a steady pipeline of similar co-branded restaurant deals in the works. As noted above, the small footprint, low-cost and relatively low-touch aspects of robotic vending machines could make them attractive platforms for restaurants looking for growth opportunities during this pandemic.

I’ve written before that I’m all-in on robotic vending machines and even wrote a comprehensive report on the market landscape for our Spoon Plus premium service.

Cafe X Closed its Airport Locations and Laid Off Staff. Now It’s Planning for the Future

Cafe X has shut down its San Jose and San Francisco airport operations, laid off staff and made a number of other market adjustments as the company adapts to the new realities brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Henry Hu, Co-Founder and CEO of Cafe X told us via Twitter messaging that with airport traffic decimated, thanks to the coronavirus, the two airport locations have been closed for months. He is unsure when they will reopen. Hu says that they are still in talks with other airports for new Cafe X locations.

At the same time, however, Cafe X has also started taking pre-orders for machines on its website, which lists the price at $200,000 per robotic kiosk ($5,000 deposit required), and says they will be shipped in Q4 of 2020.

Hu said that Cafe X is not a franchise, the company is just selling the machine and providing support, which can include recipes and menus if the customers wants. Additionally, customers can still choose to purchase coffee and supplies through Cafe X.

This is a little different from when Cafe X first started a couple years back, when the company was not only offering robot-made coffee, but also had a human on hand to provide a more curated coffee experience. The plan at that time was for Cafe X to own and operate its own machines.

The actual physical shape of the Cafe X machine has changed as well. Gone are the rounded corners of the kiosk, replaced with more square right angles.

It’s been a tumultuous year for Cafe X. In January, the company shuttered its three downtown San Francisco locations to focus on its airport business, and now those locations are closed as well. Hu said that because of the pandemic, Cafe X laid off most of its staff except for the engineers.

There does seem to be some light at the end of this COVID tunnel for Cafe X, however. Hu posted a photo on Twitter today of one of its robot kiosks being shipped off to Asia. Hu wouldn’t provide many details, but said its part of a big project in Asia that will include 150-plus machines over the next couple of years.

As I’ve written before, I’m all-in on automated vending machines like Cafe X and Briggo, especially during these pandemic times. Businesses and consumers alike will be looking for ways to reduce human-to-human interactions when it comes to getting their food. Robotic kiosks not only remove one human from the equation, but also hold all of their food and other ingredients behind glass walls away from people. Additionally, robots can run all day without taking breaks (or calling in sick). Spoon Plus subscribers can read my full report on the future of vending machines.

The pandemic is far from over (especially here in the U.S.), so we’ll see if COVID, which negatively impacted Cafe X though most of this year, could also come to the company’s rescue.

NOTE: An earlier version of this article said that Cafe-X’s order of 150 machines was happening over the coming year instead of over the next couple of years.

Woodman’s Market Adds Badger Technologies’ Robots for Shelf Scanning

Badger Technologies announced yesterday that its shelf-scanning robots will be roaming the aisles of Woodman’s Markets throughout Wisconsin and Illinois come the end of the year.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the robots will “monitor product availability, verify prices and deliver precise location data for more than 100,000 items at each location.” The plan is for the robots to be present in all 18 Woodman’s locations by the end of 2020.

The last time we wrote about Badger was January of 2019, when Ahold Delhaize ordered 500 of them for its GIANT/MARTIN and Stop & Shop stores. Those robots however, were being brought on to detect spills and other messes. (The robots didn’t even clean those up, they just alerted staff when there was a mess.)

Unlike that previous use case, Woodman’s, is using Badger’s robots to help automate inventory management. Woodman’s is far from the only store using robots for this purpose. Giant Eagle and Schnuck’s stores use Simbe Robotics’ Tally robot. And Walmart expanded the use of Bossa Nova’s shelf-scanning robot to 300 locations last year.

Pre-COVID, robots in grocery stores were seen as a threat to human jobs. Retailers like Walmart typically defended the increased automation because robots can do the manual, repetitive tasks — like monitoring inventory on store shelves — faster and more accurately than a human. Badger claims that its robots can detect out-of-stock items with more than 95 percent accuracy, and incorrect or mispriced products with 90 percent accuracy. Additionally, robots can work all day without getting and don’t need to take breaks.

During and post-COVID, however, those labor arguments may be shunted to the side as retailers and customers alike seek to cut down person-to-person interactions. Robots don’t get sick, don’t cough and can be easily sanitized by wiping them down.

Another argument in favor of more robots could be more accurate, real-time inventory data for stores and customers. With a robot roaming the aisles providing more precise item stocking information, retailers can better manage product flow and provide more accurate inventory data for people shopping online (which is happening in record numbers).

Robots are having a bit of a moment, thanks to this pandemic. Elsewhere today, online grocer FreshDirect announced a robot-powered micro-fulfillment center that is being built out by Fabric. With the coronavirus surging and re-surging around the world, robots and automation are likely to continue their march into retail throughout the rest of this year and into next.

Dexterity Robotics Has a Light Touch for Food Packing (and $56M in Funding)

Dexterity Robotics unveiled its new full-stack robotics solution for industrial applications like warehouses and supply chain management yesterday. In addition to taking the wraps off its product, Dexterity also revealed that it has raised $56.2 million, including venture investments and debt from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Obvious Ventures, Pacific West Bank, B37 Ventures, Presidio (Sumitomo) Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Stanford StartX.

Part of Dexterity’s pitch is that its grippers have enough sensitivity to pick up and pack soft, delicate items like bread. Jonathan Vanian over at Fortune got an early look at the Dexterity robots in action and wrote:

The robotic arms can figure out how much pressure is needed to apply to a particular object, which is helpful so they don’t smash a spongy material like bread when they grip it. The software also helps the robot decide to gently lower the bread and other objects into a crate instead of dropping it carelessly into a container, which Menon described as a sort of Achilles heel for some pick-and-place machines.

Food is actually a good application to help advance the entire field of robotics. In addition to much of it being soft and malleable like bread, food is often irregularly shaped (produce) and delicate (eggs). That’s why Sony partnered with Carnegie-Mellon to develop food robots, and why researchers at MIT and Harvard developed an origami robot. Soft Robotics has also developed special octopus-like rubber grippers to handle food with odd shapes and textures.

The goal with all this is robo-development is to automate the repetitive tasks like packing boxes in large warehouses. Through computer vision and a soft touch, as it were, robots can accurately sort and pack items for shipment around the clock, ideally bringing more consistency and speed to the supply chain.

With a $56.2 million warchest, we’ll have to see now if Dexterity has the agility to make an impact on the supply chain.

Kiwi’s Delivery Robots Roll Onto the Streets of San Jose, CA

Kiwi announced today that its rover robots are now delivering food and other items around two areas in San Jose, CA. According to Kiwi, what makes this rollout unique is that the company has partnered with the city itself to help mitigate deployment and maintenance issues that come with robots scurrying around city sidewalks.

Starting today, a “squad” of 25 robots will be making deliveries in the downtown area and Buena Vista neighborhoods of San Jose. As many as 120 businesses will be participating in the program.

Kiwi is also working with the city of San Jose to help with the management of the roaming robots. Kiwi Co-Founder and CEO, Felipe Chávez, told me by phone last week that previously, if a robot got stuck or broke down (or caught fire), someone would have to notify the city, which would then notify the company operating the robot. The company would then have to dispatch someone to take care of the issue, and the whole process could take a long time.

Chávez said what Kiwi has done is basically plugged into a citywide system. All of Kiwi’s robots are now displayed on a city dashboard so if one accidentally stops and blocks a curb, officials knows exactly where it is and can alert Kiwi right away.

As part of today’s announcement, Kiwi also said that it now has partnerships with Shopify and Ordermark. This allows businesses and restaurants with accounts with either of those services to easily add Kiwi’s robots to their delivery rosters.

Robots have become a more common means of delivery over the last few months. The pandemic has pushed restaurants and other businesses to adopt contactless delivery procedures, which Kiwi provides. Users order from participating restaurants on their phones select robot delivery and use their phones to unlock the robot cargo compartment when it arrives.

Additionally, robot delivery is just $3.99 per order, which the restaurant can pass on to the consumer. Four bucks to bring a burrito to your feet isn’t that bad, and there are no pesky third-party commissions eating further into a restaurant’s margins (or adding that much to a customer’s bill).

With the pandemic still raging across the country and restaurants being forced to close down again, robotic delivery can also help keep restaurant sales going, which provide much needed sales tax revenue for cities.

The bigger story here, however, might be how Kiwi has pivoted and adapted. When we first covered Kiwi, the company was focused college campus delivery, and was creating its own marketplace of restaurants that required downloading the Kiwi app to use.

First off, colleges shut down, all but eliminating campuses as an avenue for delivery. Starship, which had a number of high-profile college partnerships, had to make a similar municipal pivot.

But Kiwi is a robotics company, so building robots and a consumer marketplace was a big undertaking. So at the beginning of the year the company shifted to its current B2B model. Kiwi has also since the beginning of this year had a partnership with Latin American delivery service Rappi. Since pivoting, Chávez said Kiwi has booked 50 times more revenue than all of last year.

San Jose is just the beginning for Kiwi, as Chavez said that the company has two more high-profile partnerships that he can’t announce yet and the company is in the process of building 500 robots. Kiwi will release them in “squads” of 25 to different locations, with two humans managing and maintaining each squad.

Speaking of squad goals, if you see a Kiwi bot making a food delivery in San Jose, snap a pic and send it to us.

Miso Robotics Expands Equity Crowdfunding Efforts to the UK

Miso Robotics, maker of Flippy the robot cook, announced yesterday that it has launched an equity crowdfunding campaign in the UK on the CrowdCube platform.

Equity crowdfunding is a way of raising money from everyday investors instead of institutional investment sources. CrowdCube funders can invest as little as £10 to own a piece of Miso.

This is the second equity crowdfunding campaign for Miso, which opened one on SeedInvest here in the U.S. back in April with the goal of raising $30 million. That $30 million seems to be a global fundraising goal (yesterday’s press release states Miso is looking to raise £24 million worldwide, which is roughly $30 million USD). We’ve reached out to Miso to clarify.

According to the CrowdCube campaign page, it looks like Miso has already surpassed its UK-specific goal of £1,201,904 and has raised £2,544,720 (~$ 3.2 million USD) from 292 investors with 20 days still left to go. Coincidentally, $3.2 million is what Miso has raised in the U.S. via SeedInvest so far.

Miso’s UK crowdfunding campaign comes just one day after the company announced that U.S. fast food chain, White Castle, was using Flippy to operate the fry station in a pilot program at one of its Chicago locations. This was the first non-investor customer for Flippy, which has also gone to work at CaliBurger as well as the Dodger and Diamondback baseball stadiums.

Miso has raised $13.1 million in traditional funding, with its last round being a Series B back in February of 2018. There are actually a number of startups that have turned to equity crowdfunding in recent years including Small Robot Company (also on CrowdCube), as well as Winc, Mellow and GoSun. Equity crowdfunding helps alleviate some of the scaling pressures that come with institutional money, but also removes some of the institutional knowledge and connections that come with VCs.

Miso appears to be catching on so far with UK investors, now we need to see how many paying customers Flippy can rack up across the pond as well.