A robotic restaurant in San Francisco, 2020–2023
Mezli built an automated kitchen that cooked fresh, made-to-order Mediterranean grain bowls. Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele and Max Perham started it in 2020 as Stanford engineering graduate students, went full time in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch, and announced a $3M seed round that November.
While the machine was being built, Mezli ran a ghost kitchen at KitchenTown in San Mateo, where cooks made most of the bowls by hand for takeout and delivery. In August 2022 the robot restaurant opened at the Spark Social food park in Mission Bay. Customers ordered at a touchscreen or online, and the machine heated, portioned and assembled each bowl and handed it over through a pickup locker. During service the machine ran the restaurant on its own, with no one on site. Behind it, a culinary team prepped ingredients in the central kitchen, and staff restocked and cleaned the unit each day.
In fall 2022 the unit served about 10,000 meals, more than half of them to returning customers, with over 99% uptime and under two hours of labor a day to stock, empty and clean it, according to Alex Gruebele’s retrospective. In early 2023 Mezli set out to raise a Series A to design the machine for manufacturing at scale. The round did not close as the funding market turned, and the company wound down in 2023.
Co-founder and CEO
Left a Stanford AI PhD to start Mezli, after working as an associate product manager at Google. He studied computer science at the University of Chicago and now runs ThunderPhone, a voice AI startup in San Francisco.
Co-founder and CTO
Led engineering and designed the unit’s modular shell and ingredient cartridge system. He studied mechanical engineering at UIUC, earned a Stanford PhD in soft sensors and actuators, and now works on faster high-mix manufacturing.
Co-founder and Engineer
Came to Mezli from the space industry. He studied mechanical engineering at UMass, where he led the rocketry team, earned a Stanford MS in aerospace engineering, and at Maxar led a team of fifteen developing a new fleet of imaging satellites.
Founding Chef
Created Mezli’s menu and led its culinary team. He was chef de cuisine of the Michelin-starred Madera in Menlo Park and executive chef of Traci Des Jardins’ The Commissary in San Francisco, and now caters and consults in the Bay Area as Chef E=MC².
Founding Engineer
Built the robot’s embedded control software. He studied mechanical engineering at UMass, where he also led the rocketry team, then was a team lead at the automation firm DMC Engineering, where his last project turned COVID testing equipment into an integrated automated lab for Ginkgo Bioworks.
Engineer
Designed the robot’s mechanical systems, from custom sheet-metal and machined parts to food-safe motion units for its refrigerated interior. He studied mechanical engineering at Queen’s University and Stanford, then built a downhole ultrasound robot at DarkVision, where he now leads prototype manufacturing.
