Miso Robotics just became the food industry's largest AI and robotics patent holder. Miso Robotics acquired 300+ patents from Zume Pizza, the food robotics pioneer that raised $450M before closing in 2023. The deal makes Miso the food industry's largest AI and robotics IP holder, accelerating new features and cementing its position as the restaurant industry's go-to modernization partner. Photo: Miso Robotics June 26, 2026 The move signals a new phase of aggressive expansion for the restaurant AI company Miso Robotics has acquired the full intellectual property portfolio of Zume Pizza, the food robotics pioneer that raised approximately $450 million before winding down operations in 2023. The transaction gives Miso ownership of more than 300 patents spanning robotic food preparation, delivery, sustainability, and packaging, creating what the company says is the largest AI and robotics patent portfolio in the food industry. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Zume, founded in 2015, was one of the most high-profile players in the first wave of food robotics investment. Though the company ultimately shuttered, the intellectual property it developed over nearly a decade now moves into the hands of a company actively deploying robots in commercial kitchens today. Miso CEO Rich Hull framed the acquisition as a second-wave play. "In social media, MySpace was the first innovator, but Facebook won," Hull said. "In tablets, Palm Pilot was the first innovator, but iPad won. Zume may have been a bit too early for the market, but its advancements were game-changing. As labor shortages and rising labor costs cause restaurants to rapidly modernize today, Miso can now be the one to unlock the extreme value of this IP and accelerate our industry-leading ability to deliver provable customer ROI." The Zume deal follows Miso's recent acquisition of restaurant operations platform Zignyl, which the company is integrating into its Zippy restaurant revenue platform. The combined customer base already includes brands like Auntie Anne's, Jersey Mike's, Cinnabon, and Jamba, among others. Together, the two acquisitions reflect a deliberate strategy Hull has pursued since joining the company roughly two years ago: pair disciplined organic growth with strategic inorganic moves. Miso's flagship product, Flippy Fry Station, is currently operating across seven US states at brands including White Castle, and recently entered its first NBA arena. Included in this story. Restaurant AI Miso Robotics delivers AI automation for restaurants and hospitality. Flippy automates the fry station, reducing labor dependency with consistent execution at twice the throughput of manual operations. Zippy is your employee revenue engine, turning frontline performance into measurable business outcomes in real time. Request Info

Zume Pizza technology is acquired by Flippy owner Miso. Nation's Restaurant News | Published: June 24, 2026 | By Joe Guszkowski 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.'" Joe Guszkowski Senior editor, Restaurant Business Joe Guszkowski is a senior editor with Restaurant Business covering technology and casual-dining chains. Content Spotlight The technomic Top 500: another tough year for chain restaurants. Top 500 chain restaurant sales slowed again in 2025 as consumers cut back on dining, but sectors like coffee, beverages and snacks and chicken thrived Featured. Jun 17, 2026 Jun 10, 2026 Content Spotlight Get to know Rick Cardenas, the Darden CEO who started there as a busser. The executive shares his advice, along with his most-binged TV show, favorite sports team, and most-used app

Tech Tracker: AI chatbots are the next frontier in restaurant technology. March 16, 2026 AI has become a cornerstone of restaurant technology, shifting the conversation from if operators should invest in AI to how they should implement it. For vendors and large operators with the resources to build proprietary tech stacks, agentic AI represents the natural next frontier in automation technology. Some of the largest restaurant chains have already implemented their own virtual AI assistants to help boost labor output (Yum Brands and Burger King), assist with back of house operations (Starbucks), and improve the customer ordering experience (Papa Johns). Meanwhile, technology vendors are developing AI chatbot solutions to bridge the gap between some of the largest, resource-rich restaurant chains and everyone else. For instance, Olo is creating an AI agent inspired by Shopify to improve the e-commerce experience, while Miso Robotics recently unveiled Zippy, a large language model-powered tool. Zippy, combined with Miso's newly acquired Zignyl software platform, offers agentic assistance and insights for the company's robotics products. In addition to this evolving agentic AI trend, other tech news this month includes Grubhub testing out drone delivery, Resy merging with Tock, and more. Tech Tracker rounds up what's happening in the technology sector of the restaurant industry, including news from restaurants, vendors, digital platforms, and third-party delivery companies. Here's a breakdown of what you need to know and why. Olo is working on an AI chatbot While all eyes are on Olo's first consumer-facing digital ordering app, unveiled earlier this month at the company's annual Beyond4 event, Olo is working on more solutions through its new Olo Network. One tech tool in the works? An AI agent to improve the e-commerce experience, Olo CEO Noah Glass told Nation's Restaurant News. Olo was inspired by the Shopify ordering experience, which created a universal commerce protocol, where customers can ask the AI agent questions like, "Is the store open?" and "Is this product available?" While the technology can't quite be applied to restaurant ordering in its current form, Glass believes Olo can fill that gap. "I think being an open platform opens us up to say it's not just Olo customers who will benefit from this; we will open this up to other restaurants," Glass said. "After announcing Olo Network, we're having conversations with folks who provide ordering services and POS systems for small and medium-sized restaurants... we think we could build similar agentic commerce AI [to Shopify] that would be available for anyone to use." Miso Robotics acquires Zignyl, creates Zippy AI agent Robotics provider Miso Robotics announced the acquisition of AI-powered operations platform Zignyl last month for an undisclosed amount. With the acquisition, Zignyl will be integrated into Miso's AI product, Zippy, which was previously inaccessible to Miso customers. Zippy uses large language model (LLM) intelligence to provide data, revenue metrics, labor scheduling, forecasting, employee incentives, and task management, in both a dashboard and a Chat GPT-like agentic AI experience. Zippy will soon be able to provide metrics and AI-crafted answers to real-time questions from operator-users of Flippy the kitchen robot, with data including ROI analysis, performance metrics, live video feeds, and maintenance data. Tock merges with Resy American Express announced last month the integration of Tock under the Resy platform. While the Tock name and platform will be phased out, the two restaurant reservations platforms will combine resources, and together - over 25,000 venues will be bookable through Resy. Resy also will implement some of Tock's exclusive features, like tiered and prepaid experiences. Additionally, Resy plans to move forward with creating a tech stack that integrates AI-driven restaurant discovery and booking, table management, ticketing and transactions, point-of-sale data, and a CRM platform. "Our unique platform will drive demand, connect systems to help businesses run smarter, and provide guest insights that empower operators and their staff to create memorable moments," Pablo Rivero, CEO of Resy and senior vice president of American Express Global Dining, said in a statement. Grubhub tests out drone delivery Grubhub has announced a partnership with Dexa to create New Jersey's first drone-powered restaurant delivery program. This will also be Grubhub's first drone delivery test program, and will be available for orders placed through Wonder's Green Brook, N.J. location starting March 18. Grubhub will be delivering eligible Wonder orders with Dexa's fully automated DE-2020 model. Before each order is flown away by drone, Wonder "flight crews" make sure that the orders are packaged securely enough to survive the journey, and the drones place each order on the ground at the designated customer address using a controlled tether system. Grubhub's competitors have already been testing out drone delivery capabilities, including DoorDash's partnership with Wing, announced last year and tested with GoTo Foods, and Uber partnered with Flytrex last September to pilot a drone delivery program. DoorDash adds AI-powered pizza tool DoorDash announced a new customer-facing pizza-ordering tool powered by AI. The technology is able to interpret menu data from individual pizzerias, organize it into a step-by-step flow, and integrate choices for building a pizza into the DoorDash platform. New features include visuals for size selection, toppings, and customization so customers can see what their pizza will look like while they're building it. This feature is currently being rolled out to select pizza operators on the DoorDash platform. SlangAI and Chowbus announce funding rounds * SlangAI - Last month, the voice AI platform closed out a closed its $36M Series B funding round led by US Venture Partners, and has raised $68 million in total. The company plans to use this investment to build out its voice AI capabilities, with tools to eliminate calls, improve revenue capture and support employees in the works. * Chowbus - The AI-powered restaurant platform designed for Asian restaurants closed on an $81 million fundraising round this week. The funding round was led by Prysm Capital and Left Lane Capital. With the investment, Chowbus will be expanding beyond its integrated POS platform into more operational services for smaller restaurant brands, including marketing, accounting, supply ordering, and insurance.