What is the current state of restaurant automation and what are the main obstacles to adopting such solutions?

We're super early days and we have no visible direct competitor. There's a lot of automation going on with kiosks and front of house elements, but there's really no one tackling the labor problem for the restaurant industry and automating the way we are. The reason is it's really very hard.

Even if it comes to a highly consistent chain, planning robotic movement around such a diverse, physical location is a real challenge and super hard to do. Chipotle, for instance, is corporate-ownedand there’s about 3000 locations today and they are opening about 50 new locations per month. They have dozens of different formats and layouts for back of house and they only fry one particular food, which is chips.

But with chains like White Castle or Burger King—which is at 7,000 locations here in the US—there’s hundreds and hundreds of different building formats and dozens of different types of food to cook. McDonald's has poked around with automation when it comes to French fries, and there’ve been a few companies who looked into automation for preparing drinks.

What others have developed so far, we consider to be automation rather than robotics. Automation is something like a conveyor belt, a machine that moves without a brain or eyes. What we're doing is centered on AI and is reliant heavily upon computer vision. We have seven different cameras on our robot station. We use a robotic arm, which is a humanoid arm that hangs from an overhead rail and moves around and does the things that a human does—that’s robotics.

Now, I just rattled through a number of different technologies that have to be in a pretty advanced state and work together, and that's a hard thing to do. Miso has some of the smartest engineers on this planet—we're born out of Caltech.

85 out of a 110 people at the company are engineers, and we’re adding about five engineers a month. It takes a lot of brain power to get the technology to work together and to do it reliably. It's surprisingly easy to make one robot prototype that does stuff; it's incredibly hard to make a fleet of them that are reliable, that are robust, that work in different lighting with different size fryers,and other inconsistent elements.

And they need to work with different kinds of food in environments that change all the time, because people might scoot an oven over this way, or pull the fryers out and not put it back in the exact same place. We’re now in a place with the technology where it’s approachable, affordable, reliable, and we're just stamping them out.