After Years of Building His Robot, Stellar Pizza Founder Enjoys Dishing Pies to USC Students
Back in 2019, Benson Tsai decided to attend a conference on food robots. The engineer had spent the past five years working for Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, using what he had learned about battery technology as a member of the technical staff of electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors for space travel, but now he had a vague idea to launch a new startup that builds food robots.
At the conference, watch a panel on investing in robots featuring investor Avidan Ross, founder of Root Ventures. The two struck up a conversation and ended it, and those early conversations led to Ross becoming Tsai’s first investor.
In those early days, Tsai thought maybe he would build an Asian food robot, mainly because he loved Asian food. However, over time he became fond of another type of food: Pizza.
“I ended up looking at what makes sense to automate,” Tsai told Spoon in an interview this week.
Tsai began working on his robot, hiring 30 or so SpaceX engineers in the process. He will also raise more money than the initial $9 million investment led by Ross’s Root Ventures, the latest being a $16.5 million funding round led by Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures.
Four years and more than $25 million in investment later, the Stellar Pizza food robot is ready to go and, just a few weeks ago, it was serving pizza on the USC campus. The robot travels to campus in a shuttle van, where students order pizza using the Stellar Pizza app.
I asked Tsai if he serves food from his robotic truck, and he said yes, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I really enjoy going to the field,” said Tsai. “I spent a lot of time working on crazy robots, and now I get to see people bite into pizza, and it’s really fulfilling.”
Tsai says that so far, things are going very well. The Stellar Pizza van rolls into campus five days a week, and is already seeing many repeat customers.
“We’re at 45-50% repeat customers,” said Tsai.
I asked him what the company’s long-term vision is and whether it plans to offer the technology to other large pizza chains. He told me that might be in the cards in the future, but for now, he’s excited about building an end-to-end robot pizza company.
“There’s nothing on the table, but right now, we’re chasing the idea of Stellar Pizza, especially selling pizzas because, first of all, building hardware that can make 100 pizza recipes is actually very difficult. So we’re doing dogfood and building our own brand, and if that works out, maybe we’ll pursue that.”
Tsai and her company have come a long way since those early days when she first attended that conference back in 2019; The first Stellar product is in the field and happy customers are coming back for more.
Oh, and that first conference? It was The Spoon’s Articulate, the first ever conference on food robots.
If you’d like to hear Tsai tell the story of building his pizza robot, sign up for The Spoon’s next food robotics event, Food Robotics 2023 Outlook, a virtual conference next Wednesday.
