Piestro

Piestro offers a 24/7 pizza-making robot that can deliver pizzas within three minutes. The company pitches its product toward pizza chains, food courts, shopping malls, universities, and office complexes. The company’s business model includes providing white label pizzerias powered by Piestro, as well as launching its own pizzerias to access consumers directly. Piestro plans to deploy its first commercial units by H2 2022, under a robot-as-a-service (RaaS) model, which, as per the latest prototype, would be offered for around USD 7,500 per annum. The company claims that once deployed, this would be a higher-margin business (profit margin of 48%) compared to the traditional pizzeria (22%).

Key customers and partnerships

Piestro has several product partnerships including 1) agreements with delivery droid manufacturers Kiwibot (October 2020) and Serve Robotics (July 2022) to offer contactless pizza delivery for respective customers; and 2) a deal with PopID, a facial recognition-based payment company, to enable customers to use its PopPay e-wallet (March 2021).

The company has several commercial partnerships with companies including 1) Canada-based Carbone Restaurant Group (CRG) (a USD 50 million deal; July 2021); 2) international pizza brand 800 Degrees Pizza (for 3,600 robot units worth USD 530 million in revenue; August 2021); 3) Wing Zone fast-casual restaurant (to install robots at 20+ locations; June 2022); and 4) fast-casual sandwich franchise Capriotti's Sandwich Shop (to supply up to 100 units within five years of the initial pilot; July 2022).

Funding and financials

In July 2022 Piestro closed its Series A equity crowdfunding campaign raising USD 10.5 million (launched in February 2022, targeting to raise USD 20 million at a valuation of USD 80 million). Previously, in October 2021, the company raised USD 4.7 million through another equity crowdfunding campaign.