( ENSPIRE Community Spotlight ) RoboBurger Raises $10M in Seed 2 Funding Round
ENSPIRE Contributor: Perry Merse Jr.
RoboBurger Inc. is the founder of the world’s first robotic burger chef that grills, toasts, add condiments, and assembles a fresh burger in 4 minutes. RoboBurger Inc. recently opened a Seed 2 funding round, allowing it to grow and increase production of its RoboBurger Mark 2 unit to keep up with demand. RoboBurger partnered with Promethean Investments LLP, a private equity firm headquartered in London. Seed funding for Roboburger boomed, reaching $10 million. This is noteworthy because Roboburger is a Black-owned business. Venture capital is massive, yet only a small amount of funding makes it to Black founders. Automation is also an influential innovation, as it can help businesses save on labor costs and meet demand faster.
Michael Burt, a founding partner at Promethean LLP, comments, “To plagiarize Bill Gates we believe RoboBurger & its food combinations will make the world pretty fantastic compared to today. Audley and his team have delivered a remarkable (delicious) product with patented solutions, addressing the challenges of grilling fresh food in a Robotic vending machine. Promethean believes that Roboburger and its focus on automation and robotics will be the solution to deal with the labor availability and cost and inflation challenges we see in hospitality & food production today. We look forward to helping take Roboburger global.”
Audley Wilson, the CEO of RoboBurger says, “We have received an overwhelming amount of interest from around the world. This new round of funding will allow us to rapidly scale up and keep up with the incredible demand as we continue to roll out RoboBurger units across the US.”
RoboBurger was founded by CEO Audley Wilson, CTO Dan Braido, and CMO Andy Siegel in Newark, NJ. They dreamed that students would have access to hot food even at 2 am while they were studying for finals. The RoboBurger delivers a restaurant-quality burger within a compact machine. Its patented design consists of a refrigeration system to keep ingredients fresh, a griddle to cook on, and a dishwasher to self-clean. Another part of RoboBurger’s mission is to create local tech jobs and make their robots in the US.
In March 2022, RoboBurger debuted with a pop-up location in Newport Mall in Jersey City. The pop-up allowed customers to give valuable feedback. As a result, new units can deliver customers a freshly grilled burger in about 4 minutes. Second-generation units are planned to launch in Pilot Flying J – a truck stop chain in Newark at a university in Queens, New York, and at The Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.
Watch Audley, Dan, and Andy talk about RoboBurger below:
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