Summary
Miso Robotics is a Pasadena, California-based company that builds Flippy, an AI-powered robotic fry station deployed in commercial kitchens to automate frying, one of the most dangerous and hardest-to-staff positions in a restaurant. Founded in 2016 by a team with roots at Caltech, Miso originally built Flippy as a burger-flipping robot for the CaliBurger chain before pivoting to focus on the fry station, where the labor problem and total addressable market proved far larger.
Miso is notable within the robotics industry for pioneering large-scale equity crowdfunding as a funding strategy, raising more than $130 million from over 40,000 individual retail investors through Regulation A+ and Regulation CF offerings—alongside strategic investment from global hygiene company Ecolab and an AI collaboration with NVIDIA. Under CEO Rich Hull, who joined in 2023, Miso has shifted focus from prototyping to commercial deployment, launching a smaller, faster third-generation Flippy and expanding into adjacent restaurant software through the 2026 acquisitions of workforce-intelligence platform Zignyl and the technology and patent portfolio of failed pizza-robotics pioneer Zume.
As of mid-2026, Flippy operates across seven U.S. states with brands including White Castle, and the company reports having fried more than 5 million baskets in live commercial deployments. Miso continues to rely heavily on investor financing to fund operations, according to its own SEC filings, and has not disclosed exact unit deployment counts or a path to profitability.
Company Story
Miso Robotics traces its origin to a collaboration between restaurant entrepreneur John Miller, chairman and CEO of the parent company of fast-food chain CaliBurger, and venture capitalist Buck Jordan, who wanted to bring automation into the commercial kitchen. The two recruited a founding technical team—David Zito, who became founding CEO, along with Rob Anderson and Ryan Sinnet, a robotics PhD who had spent years engineering human-like gait for robots—to design and build the product. The company was incorporated in Delaware on June 20, 2016, initially under the name Super Volcano, Inc., before being renamed Miso Robotics on October 3, 2016. Its offices were located just a few miles from Caltech, and much of its early technical talent had ties to the university.
The company’s first product, Flippy, debuted at a CaliBurger location in Pasadena in 2017, drawing crowds and media attention as “the world’s first autonomous robotic kitchen assistant.” Flippy used computer vision to identify food, a thermal camera to track patty temperature, and control theory to operate a spatula, flip burgers, and clean the grill. All Miso employees, including CEO Zito, worked shifts as CaliBurger grill cooks to understand the job Flippy was designed to augment. CaliBurger committed to deploying Flippy in at least 50 of its restaurants over the following two years.
Working alongside restaurant operators, Miso’s team discovered that burger flipping, while eye-catching, represented a smaller opportunity than another back-of-house pain point: the fry station. Nearly every restaurant serves fried foods—French fries, onion rings, chicken nuggets—making the fry station a far larger addressable market than burger grills alone, and one of the most dangerous and hardest-to-staff positions in any commercial kitchen due to hot oil, repetitive motion, and high turnover. Miso pivoted Flippy’s design accordingly, developing a “Robot-on-a-Rail” (ROAR) system built for the fry station rather than the grill.
In July 2020, Miso signed an agreement with White Castle to develop, pilot, and conduct a beta rollout of the ROAR system across White Castle’s North American restaurants. The first commercial pilot ran at a Chicago-area location through the second half of 2020, and in February 2021, White Castle announced plans to expand deployment to 100 standalone locations—a landmark commercial validation for Miso’s fry-focused strategy. That same period, Miso also deployed Flippy 2 at other chains including Jack in the Box and CaliExpress.
Financially, Miso pursued an unconventional path relative to most robotics startups. After raising modest early venture funding (a $3 million round in 2017, and roughly $15 million combined across its Series A and B), the company turned to equity crowdfunding for its Series C round in late 2020 via SeedInvest, raising $16.7 million at an $80 million valuation. This proved to be the first of several large crowdfunded rounds: a Series D in 2022 via Dalmore Group raised over $53 million at a reported $500 million valuation, followed by a Series E and subsequent Regulation A+ and Regulation CF offerings through DealMaker Securities that continued into 2026. In total, Miso says it has raised over $130 million from more than 40,000 individual crowdfunding investors—a base the company has described as functioning like “an army of marketers” for the brand, given crowdfunding investors’ incentive to promote the product they’ve invested in.
In November 2021, Miso became the founding stockholder of Ally Robotics, a subsidiary formed to build affordable, lightweight robotic arms for the restaurant industry, initially holding a 93% equity stake (later diluted to approximately 56% by mid-2023). In May 2023, Miso announced a strategic partnership and multi-million-dollar investment from Ecolab, the global hygiene, food-safety, and cleaning-solutions company, which also began offering Flippy rentals through its own 6,000-person sales force.
A significant leadership change occurred in 2023: Rich Hull joined as CEO in May, followed by Dr. Bachir Kharraja as CTO in November, shifting the company’s emphasis from R&D and prototyping toward commercial deployment at scale. Under this leadership, Miso built a patented AI infrastructure platform called the Miso Hub and, in October 2024, launched a next-generation Flippy that was half the size, twice as fast, and installed in a few hours rather than over multiple days—developed in close collaboration with NVIDIA, whose Isaac robotics platform, cuMotion motion-planning library, and vision AI technology were integrated into the new design. NVIDIA highlighted Flippy publicly at CES in January 2025.
In February 2026, Miso acquired Zignyl, a restaurant workforce and operations-intelligence platform, integrating it into a new product called Zippy, which combines Flippy’s real-time kitchen data with broader restaurant operations analytics. In June 2026, Miso made a more unusual acquisition: the technology, hardware, software, and patent portfolio of Zume, a once-heavily-funded pizza robotics startup that had raised roughly $450 million before shutting down completely in 2023. Miso paid just $35,000 in common stock for the Zume assets, plus a six-year earnout tied to future licensing or product use, gaining access to more than 300 patents spanning robotic food preparation, delivery, and packaging—assets CEO Rich Hull said would help Miso expand into pizza automation and build a stronger defensive patent position in food robotics.
Founders
David Zito (Co-founder, former CEO) served as Miso’s founding chief executive, leading the company through its early years, the original burger-flipping Flippy launch, and the initial pivot toward the fry station. Zito worked CaliBurger grill shifts alongside his engineering team to ground Flippy’s design in the realities of commercial kitchen work.
Buck Jordan (Co-founder, President and Chairman) is a venture capitalist who co-founded Miso alongside John Miller and has remained involved with the company as a director and later as President and Chairman of the Board. Jordan has been a Partner at Wavemaker Partners since 2018 and founded Vebu Labs (originally Wavemaker Labs), a corporate venture studio, in 2016. He has spoken publicly about Flippy’s early “cult following” at CaliBurger and Miso’s crowdfunding strategy.
Ryan Sinnet (Co-founder) is a robotics engineer who spent roughly seven years, from 2008 to 2015, working on human-like robot gait engineering before completing his doctorate. After a period developing AI tools for a solar-powered farming venture, Sinnet was recruited by David Zito to join Miso’s founding technical team, contributing his expertise in control theory and robotic motion to Flippy’s original design.
Robert Anderson (Co-founder) was recruited by David Zito as part of the founding technical team, alongside Ryan Sinnet, bringing Caltech-area engineering expertise to Flippy’s initial development.
John Miller (Co-founder) is chairman and CEO of the parent company of CaliBurger and PopID, and was an early employee at Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals. Miller, together with Buck Jordan, originated the idea for Miso Robotics and provided CaliBurger as the real-world restaurant testbed where Flippy was first developed and deployed.
Products
Flippy Fry Station is Miso’s flagship product, a robotic arm system mounted on a rail that automates the frying of French fries, onion rings, chicken nuggets, and other fried foods in commercial kitchens. The current, third-generation version, launched in 2024, is roughly half the size and twice as fast as its predecessor, and installs in existing kitchens in a few hours rather than days. It uses AI-driven computer vision developed in collaboration with NVIDIA to classify menu items with a claimed 99.9% accuracy and can process more than 100 baskets per hour. Miso says Flippy can handle approximately 90% of fry-station labor, working every shift without calling out, and that White Castle team members report a favorable experience working alongside the robot in internal surveys.
Zippy (formerly Zignyl) is Miso’s software and operations-intelligence platform, acquired via the February 2026 Zignyl acquisition and integrated with Flippy’s real-time kitchen data. Zippy is positioned as an AI-powered mobile dashboard that helps restaurant operators set performance goals, track employee incentives, and access analytics across multiple locations, combining physical automation data with broader workforce and revenue management insights. Case studies cite deployments with brands including Jersey Mike’s and Auntie Anne’s.
Miso Hub is the company’s underlying patented AI infrastructure platform, which powers Flippy and other Miso products and is designed to allow them to communicate and share data seamlessly. Additional smaller products in Miso’s lineup have included Sippy, an automated soda fountain, and CookRight Coffee, a monitoring system for coffee urn temperature and inventory levels.
Ally Robotics arms, developed by Miso’s majority-owned subsidiary Ally Robotics (founded 2021), are lightweight, lower-cost robotic arms intended for broader restaurant automation applications beyond frying.
Funding
Miso Robotics has pursued an unusually crowdfunding-heavy financing strategy relative to most robotics startups, raising more than $130 million from over 40,000 individual retail investors through a series of Regulation A+ and Regulation CF equity crowdfunding rounds, in addition to traditional venture and strategic capital.
The company’s earliest funding came from a $3 million self-managed round in June 2017 under Regulation D, followed by roughly $15 million combined across subsequent Series A and B rounds from venture investors including Cali Group (CaliBurger’s parent) and angel investors. Facing a down round for its planned Series C, Miso pivoted to equity crowdfunding, raising $16.7 million via SeedInvest in November 2020 at an $80 million valuation. This was followed by a Series D crowdfunding round via Dalmore Group in mid-2022 that raised over $53 million at a reported $500 million valuation, and further Series E and follow-on Regulation A+/CF campaigns through DealMaker Securities in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026, with disclosed post-money valuations ranging from roughly $221 million to $298 million across different campaigns.
In May 2023, global hygiene and food-safety company Ecolab made a direct strategic investment in Miso for an undisclosed amount, alongside a technology and sales partnership. As of its most recent SEC filings, Miso disclosed cash and cash equivalents of approximately $9.8 million as of December 31, 2025 (up from $5.3 million a year earlier), and stated that it “remains reliant on investor financing to support its operations” and anticipated raising additional funds through Regulation A and Regulation D offerings in 2026. Notably, the company has emphasized that crowdfunding valuations are set by company management’s own subjective estimates rather than market-driven pricing, and prior high crowdfunding valuations (such as the $500 million figure from 2022) have not necessarily been validated by subsequent institutional financing rounds.
Partnerships
Ecolab, the global leader in water, hygiene, and infection-prevention solutions, is both a strategic investor and commercial partner. Since its May 2023 investment, Ecolab has contributed expertise to Flippy’s cleaning speed, procedures, and food-safety capabilities, and has begun offering Flippy rentals to its own customers through a dedicated sales team drawn from its roughly 6,000-person sales force—giving Miso access to a vastly larger distribution channel than it could build independently.
NVIDIA has been a key AI technology collaborator since at least 2024, with Miso integrating NVIDIA Isaac ROS, the cuMotion CUDA-accelerated motion-planning library, and NVIDIA Isaac Sim simulation tools into Flippy’s vision and motion systems. The collaboration has driven reported reductions in robot planning times and task-completion speeds, and NVIDIA has publicly referenced Flippy in its own marketing, including a mention at CES 2025.
White Castle has been Miso’s most important and longest-running restaurant partner, beginning with a July 2020 development agreement and 2020–2021 pilot deployment that led to a public commitment to expand Flippy to 100 locations. As of Miso’s most recent annual report, the company stated its intent to deploy Flippy in nearly one-third of White Castle’s approximately 350 U.S. restaurants, and White Castle deployments span seven states with a reported 3,700-plus fry-station orders processed daily.
Amazon Web Services provides cloud infrastructure that Miso uses for simulation-based development and testing of its robotics software.
Miso has also made two acquisitions in 2026 that function as de facto technology and talent partnerships folded into the company: Zignyl, a restaurant workforce-intelligence platform acquired in February 2026, and the technology and patent portfolio of Zume, a defunct pizza robotics company, acquired in June 2026 for a nominal $35,000 in stock plus a long-dated earnout.
Timeline
2016 — Miso Robotics incorporated in Delaware (initially as Super Volcano, Inc.) by David Zito, Buck Jordan, Ryan Sinnet, Rob Anderson, and John Miller, with ties to Caltech and CaliBurger.
2017 — Flippy debuts as a burger-flipping robotic kitchen assistant at a CaliBurger location in Pasadena, drawing crowds and media coverage. Miso raises $3 million in an early Regulation D round.
2020 — Miso pivots Flippy toward the fry station and signs a development agreement with White Castle in July, piloting the Robot-on-a-Rail system at a Chicago-area restaurant. Raises $16.7 million via SeedInvest crowdfunding at an $80 million valuation.
2021 — White Castle announces plans to expand Flippy to 100 locations in February. Miso becomes founding stockholder of subsidiary Ally Robotics in November, developing lower-cost robotic arms for restaurants.
2022 — Raises over $53 million in Series D crowdfunding via Dalmore Group at a reported $500 million valuation.
2023 — Ecolab makes a strategic investment and partnership announcement in May. Rich Hull becomes CEO in May and Dr. Bachir Kharraja becomes CTO in November, shifting company strategy toward commercial deployment.
2024 — Launches next-generation Flippy 3 in October, developed with NVIDIA, that is half the size and twice as fast as its predecessor. Continues Series E and follow-on crowdfunding campaigns through DealMaker Securities.
2025 — Flippy is referenced at CES by NVIDIA. Miso continues expanding White Castle and other chain deployments, surpassing 5 million baskets fried across seven states. Continues Regulation A+/CF crowdfunding campaigns.
2026 — Acquires Zignyl in February, relaunching it as Zippy. Acquires the technology and 300+ patent portfolio of Zume Pizza in June for $35,000 in stock plus an earnout, expanding into pizza automation ambitions and food-robotics patent defense.
Market Context
Miso Robotics operates in the food-service automation market at a moment when persistent labor shortages, rising minimum wages, and high turnover in the hardest, most dangerous, and least desirable kitchen positions have made restaurant automation increasingly commercially attractive. The fry station—hot, greasy, and physically demanding—has proven a more durable and universal automation target than the burger grill Miso originally set out to automate, since nearly every quick-service restaurant serves some form of fried food regardless of its core menu.
The company’s decade-long survival and continued fundraising distinguish it from a wave of well-funded food robotics peers that have failed to reach sustainable scale, most notably Zume, the pizza robotics company whose $450 million in funding and eventual 2023 shutdown Miso now owns the remnants of, as well as other failed pizza automation startups like Piestro and Basil Street. Miso’s own SEC filings acknowledge ongoing reliance on investor financing, and the company has been notably reluctant to disclose exact unit deployment figures, instead emphasizing aggregate metrics like total baskets fried and the number of states in which Flippy operates.
Miso’s financing strategy—raising the bulk of its disclosed capital through equity crowdfunding rather than traditional venture capital—is a significant point of differentiation in the broader robotics industry, where most well-known companies (Figure AI, 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, etc.) rely on institutional venture and private equity funding. This approach has allowed Miso to build a large base of more than 40,000 retail shareholders who have some incentive to promote the brand, but it also means the company’s disclosed valuations (which have ranged from roughly $80 million to $500 million across different crowdfunding campaigns) are set by company management rather than tested by institutional investors through arm’s-length negotiation, a distinction Miso itself discloses prominently in its regulatory filings.
Strategic partnerships with Ecolab and NVIDIA have provided Miso with both a distribution channel—through Ecolab’s large existing sales force serving the food-service industry—and a technology roadmap grounded in NVIDIA’s broader robotics AI platform, positioning Flippy’s third generation as a meaningfully more capable and more easily installed product than earlier versions. The 2026 acquisitions of Zignyl and Zume signal a strategic ambition to move beyond a single robotic station toward a broader restaurant automation and intellectual-property platform, though it remains to be seen whether Miso can successfully commercialize pizza automation where Zume and other well-funded predecessors failed, or whether the company’s core Flippy fry-station business alone can achieve sustainable, profitable scale after nearly a decade of operation and continued dependence on new investor capital.
Source Notes
This profile draws on Miso Robotics’ own “About” page and investor relations materials, its SEC filings (Form 1-K annual report and Form 1-U current reports, which are required for companies conducting Regulation A+ offerings), Crunchbase, Kingscrowd’s crowdfunding campaign database, and independent reporting from Business Insider, Forbes, Nation’s Restaurant News, QSR Magazine, Restaurant Technology News, Pizza Marketplace, and Food On Demand.
Funding round dates, amounts, and valuations for the company’s crowdfunding campaigns (Series C through ongoing 2026 offerings) are sourced primarily from Kingscrowd’s tracked database of Miso’s DealMaker Securities and Dalmore Group filings, cross-referenced with Miso’s own SEC disclosures. Because crowdfunding valuations are set by company management rather than through negotiated institutional pricing, they should be treated as company-asserted figures rather than independently validated market valuations, a distinction Miso itself discloses in its offering documents.
Company history, including the founding team, the CaliBurger origin story, and the pivot from burger-flipping to fry-station automation, draws on Caltech’s alumni magazine profile of co-founder Ryan Sinnet, Miso’s own company history timeline, and contemporaneous 2017 TechCrunch coverage of Flippy’s debut. Recent developments, including the Rich Hull-led leadership transition, the NVIDIA collaboration, and the 2026 Zignyl and Zume acquisitions, are sourced from Miso’s press releases and multiple independent trade publications covering the restaurant technology sector. Given the fast-moving nature of Miso’s crowdfunding campaigns and acquisition activity, financial and deployment figures should be re-verified against current sources.