Summary
David Zito is a co-founder and the founding CEO of Miso Robotics, the company behind Flippy, the AI-powered kitchen robot that helped define commercial food automation. A Caltech mechanical engineering graduate (BS ‘97) and serial entrepreneur, Zito led Miso from its 2016 garage origins through Flippy’s viral CaliBurger debut, before moving on to later AI and internet-economics ventures.
Career
Zito earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1997. His career began the same year at Idealab under Bill Gross, working on IdeaMarket and GoTo.com—the pioneering pay-per-click search engine that became Overture, was acquired by Yahoo for $1.63 billion, and licensed its intellectual property to Google. Early roles also included customer support and product work that he has described as a “trial by fire” in consumer web product development.
Over the following decades Zito built or led product and technology at a string of startups and larger companies. He served as Vice President of Web Development at PayMyBills.com, held engineering director roles at Yahoo, and was Chief Technology Officer at TrueX (formerly SocialVibe), which was acquired by Fox. He grew education startup Cramster from roughly $5 million to more than $20 million in ARR before its sale to Chegg. He is also a co-inventor of the flameless candle through Enjoy Lighting, a product category he has said grew into a billion-dollar market.
In 2016, Zito became founding CEO of Miso Robotics after reconnecting with Caltech basketball contacts including Ryan Sinnet. He recruited Sinnet and fellow Caltech alumnus Robert Anderson to the founding technical team and personally worked CaliBurger grill shifts so Flippy’s design would reflect real kitchen conditions. Under Zito’s leadership, Flippy debuted as a burger-flipping robot in 2017, attracted national media attention (including a USA Today front page), and later pivoted toward fry-station automation. Zito has described building Flippy “out of a garage with other Caltech alumni” and raising early capital that he has publicly pegged around the $20 million range during his tenure, with partners including Walmart and Compass Group among those he has cited.
After leaving Miso’s CEO role, Zito continued founding and product work in AI. He founded Subi.ai (Agents4All) in March 2023 to build agent infrastructure for marketing; it was acquired by ProRata.ai in February 2025. As of 2026 he has led product and engineering for Gist GEO at ProRata.ai, an Idealab company focused on brand visibility in generative search. Caltech profiles have described him as a nine-time early-stage builder with venture raises and consumer-software exits totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in aggregate exit value across his career.
Source Notes
This profile draws on David Zito’s LinkedIn profile, Caltech ENGenuity’s alumnus interview, MarketScreener executive records, and contemporaneous TechCrunch coverage of Flippy’s 2017 launch in which Zito was quoted as CEO. Funding and partner figures attributed to Zito’s LinkedIn summary reflect his own public statements about his Miso tenure and may not match later company-wide crowdfunding totals.