What is the sales process and go-to-market strategy of Miso Robotics in their transition from R&D to commercialization?

We have a tidal wave of demand—if I gave you numbers you’d find it hard to believe. We're the only one solving the single biggest problem vexing the restaurant industry today. Five years ago, there was a labor challenge.

Today, that is still the number one challenge for pretty much every brand we're talking to. Actually, many of them are referring to it as a ‘crisis’. They cannot staff certain locations with the minimum number of people required to open up. That leads to reducing hours and has become an acute problem. It is not being solved any other way other than automation. There's just simply no other scenario where 1.6 million people return to this work economy and start working in restaurants again. This problem predated the pandemic—the pandemic accelerated it and worsened it.

 We have the awareness of the industry—they've known about us and I've personally been in this industry for many years. We have a handful of announced partnerships and upwards of a dozen and a half others that are not yet announced. Those companies are in pilot, and looking to aggressively roll out. We announce them whenever the customers are ready to be announced. We're neutral and support whatever they want to do regarding publicity.

The way the process works is that we literally have no sales people, we have no marketing people. We’ve got a hundred and ten people here, most of them are engineers. These brands are in ongoing conversations with me or my chief of strategy and head of product. 

What usually happens is we'll cook their food at our headquarters with a robot in our laboratory. We have the machine learn and understand the recipes and identify that food. Then, they'll come out here and see that happen. We'll show them the throughput, the cooking accuracy the cooking precision and they'll taste the food. We'll show them the numbers to illustrate what they can expect in their environments in terms of throughput and accuracy.  

Typically, a new customer does opt to have one of our robots installed in one of their environments. Some of them have test kitchens, and some of them just put it in a live restaurant, but they'll usually run it in a live restaurant or a test kitchen for about 60 days or so.

From there, they can enter into the adoption phase where they start to roll them out. The pace of rollout can be all over the board. Every brand's a little different with how they're looking at this. That has a lot to do with their staffing, but we’re in that pilot stage with upwards of fifteen global brands right now. The robots are performing really well.