Here at The Spoon, we’ve been following nearly every robot restaurant concept over the past decade, and we’ve watched dozens of corporate ideas and billions of dollars flow in and out of this space.
One company that has gone and seems to be coming back is the creator. For those new to the space, Mdali was/is a robot restaurant company founded in 2012 (developed in 2009) in San Francisco. The company, which raised nearly $60 million in its early life, closed its flagship store during the COVID crisis and has limped along ever since, opening locations like Daly City. From the outside, it looks like the company has really shut down in the last few years.
But not immediately. According to the company’s website and an announcement on LinkedIn, Mdali is back as a robotic burger platform startup focused on providing technology to other types of restaurants.
From the company’s website: “Creator as a brand continues – but the platform is bigger than the product. The technology has been redesigned to allow any operator to use it under their existing brand, or for new brands to build a sustainable concept around the technology.”
In other words, Mdali is abandoning the past of what he describes as “robot theater,” and instead is betting that his technology can fit into existing chains, transforming a once highly visible, consumer-facing robot into a back-of-the-house infrastructure.
The pivot comes after the company said it began discussions with other restaurant chains in 2024 and ultimately decided to focus on serving existing restaurant brands instead of building new locations focused on the “robot restaurant” concept.
According to the company, it began bringing in new talent in 2025 and saw long-term employees transition into new leadership roles. Creator’s CEO is now Michael Balsamo, who joined the company as a hardware engineer in 2014 after working at Tesla and progressed through roles including director of hardware engineering and CTO before assuming the role of chief executive last year. Another full-time employee of the company is Peter Rosenbaum, head of engineering and hardware, who joined Mdali in 2019.
Other executives the company is promoting appear to be serving in advisory roles, including Atul Sood (former chief business officer at Kitchen United), Eric Hansen (former global head of corporate sales for Uber Eats and business development for Nuro), Ron Glavan (former SVP of new equipment at Wendy’s), and chef JJ Johnson, author and owner of the well-known Field Trip.
Notably absent from the company’s current leadership is Alex Vardakostas, the original founder who began working on what would become Creator in 2009. According to Vardakostas’s LinkedIn, he currently works as a researcher with consulting companies, and retired from Mdali in March 2023.
The company has a booth this week at the Restaurant Leadership Conference in Phoenix, which is the coming-out party for the newly formed Creator. While the company’s website says it has a San Francisco location coming soon, the big game seems to be seeing if it can benefit as a robotics platform for existing chains.
Given the company’s previous setup, where a robot was facing the consumer and a burger could take four minutes to make, it will be interesting to see how the reimagined creator platform makes a difference in the supply chain. Typical fast food restaurants operate at a fast pace, each burger is made very quickly, and high volume locations produce many, if not larger, burgers at the same time.
I hope we find out soon.
You can see the first generation Creator in action below.
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