Friday, March 5, 2021
Interview with Buck Jordan, Miso Robotics
For our interview today, we caught up with Buck Jordan, the founder of Miso Robotics (www.misorobotics.com), to hear more about what the company is doing with robots in the food service business; how the pandemic has helped push interest in its technology; as well as heard more about the company's unusual move to raise its funding from equity crowdfunding rather than more traditional venture capital.
What is Miso Robotics?
Buck Jordan: Miso Robotics is bringing the power of automation to commercial kitchens, and addressing one of the biggest challenges of the food industry, which is increasing production with the expansion of the delivery market, while also safely decreasing human contact. Flippy is the first, automated kitchen assistant, which can grill and fry food. It runs our proprietary technology, and it's a platform that people can plug into. Grilling and frying are just the first features, and there are many more in the future. Our software is also able to optimize workflows and speed, so that the robot is not just taking orders, it's also doing a better job coordinating the kitchen. As operating needs are increasing, Flippy is fully autonomous, all the food cooked is made with minimal human contact—which is a huge concern post-pandemic—reducing exposure to pathogens. That's not going away anytime soon, even after people are fully vaccinated. I think, now more than ever, Flippy meets the distinct challenges and can help our customers spur new growth.
How did you go from running a venture fund to starting Miso?
Buck Jordan: The story is, I was at the tail end of my last fund, Canyon Creek Capital, and I wanted to try something different. I had been seed investing and incubating businesses, and was sitting with a friend of mine, John Miller, who ran Caliburger, which is a 35 location burger chain, which is exporting the California lifestyle, much like In-N-Out does. We were sitting at Huckleberry Cafe in Santa Monica, and I asked him if labor was a big problem for his business. He rolls his eyes, and says yes, there is a problem, because it's 35 percent of the top line, and every six months the millennials quit, and it's three months if they are on the fryer. He told me it mad training people and making good products very difficult. On top of that, god forbid, if someone gets E. Coli, they become Chipotle. This was in mid-2016, and the decreasing costs of robotics and computer vision made me think that the process of making a burger could be fully automated. He thought that was bullshit, and he said—if you are able to do this, he told me he'd be my first customer and supply us with seed capital. So, with the last funds out of my fund, I started Miso Robotics. Two months after that, I called him into a tiny garage w had, and made a robot flip a burger, and won the bet. He made an investment into the company, which ended up being a great move on his part, because his stake in the company is huge, and that's how we started. I recruited a team to run and build the business.
Let's talk a bit about crowdfunding, why crowdfund for the business?
Buck Jordan: I'm inspired by the mission of crowdfunding. It's equalized finance, and it's equalized an elite, walled-off section of finance, venture capital. Crowdfunding allows everyday people the opportunity to help transform technology, and be part of that transformation. You no longer have to be an investor in a giant venture capital fund. The demand is there. There are now over 8,000 investors to date who have invested $1000 to $2000 each. We really expanded our crowdfunding effort a few weeks ago. We had initially launched a campaign in April of last year, when the pandemic was in full swing. Even before the pandemic, labor and the high cost of delivery was booming, making profits difficult for quick serve restaurants. After COVID, now they need this to survive. With the focus on health and delivery, that takes 30 percent of profits for restaurants. Plus, in a tiny, commercial kitchen, you're elbow to elbow, and there's no way to social distance. Robots are the only solution for social distancing in the kitchen. Because of that, the timing of this has really resonated with the public as investors. By the time we closed in November, we had raised $17M, hit major milestones, and we were the highest grossing technology deal on SeedInvest, with the highest raise in a day. We could have raised more, but apparently, we crashed SeedInvest's entire site on the last day of the campaign. We're targeting $30M now in our fundraising, $10M this year. The money raised will go to bring in more incredible talent into the fold, our new CSO, Jake Brewer, to provide a even greater customer experience to our food service customers. We have big plans for Flippy. We are going to price down the hardware, up the AI, and start cooking more foods, helping out with restaurant inventory management, and help our customers better utilize their kitchen space. That's just the highlights.
Speaking of customers, can you talk about who they are now?
Buck Jordan: We ended up putting together a partnership with White Castle last year. The testing at our pilot location is real promising, and the team members there are overwhelmingly positive about Flippy. They love Flippy, and it allows them to keep up with demand despite social distancing, making what would otherwise be impossible. It also allows team members to spend more time on takeout and delivery driver coordination, which is skyrocketing right now. White Castle is now on board for 10 more robots, and after that they'll make a roll out decision. We're also at Caliburger in Pasadena, at Dodger Stadium, and Chase Field. COVID is really changing the game. Don't be surprised to see some really large customers coming on board this year, it's an exciting time for us.
How did you make the move from the military to finance and investment, that seems like an somewhat unusual route?
Buck Jordan: If you think about it, in the Army, I was in tanks, and the transitioned to helicopters. I went from the highest risk activities in the military, to high risk, financial activities. Obviously, venture has a high alpha. But my start was pretty unusual. I never applied to venture firms, because I never thought they'd like to hire me, though I did get an MBA—which is largely useless. What I did, is I went to every single event I could go to, and networked my way into a small investor base. When I started Canyon Creek Capital, trying to build an angel group, I did my first deal by scraping together $70,000 from ten friends, including some very, very, very small checks. I did that for free, and figured out that was way too much work to do for free. So, the next time, I decided I would charge some carried interest. I ended up doing a pledge fund, just doing deal by deal syndication, and ended up deploying $6M across 11 deals. I was lucky enough to get three exits, and the rest are alive and doing well today. On the back of those exits, I raised a small, sub-10 million fund, Canyon Creek Capital, from those investors—the reason why, is it's easiest to raise capital when you're giving people money. They love you in the moment, and will forget about you in six months. So that was Canyon Creek, and I also kept up the pledge fund, which ended up deploying 30M in total. Our last investment at Canyon Creek was Miso Robotics.
What is your relationship with Wavemaker?
Buck Jordan: I'm a partner at Wavemaker, where I spend some time on the fund, but where I spend the bulk of my time at Wavemaker Labs. Labs are a really unique vehicle, focused on early stage robotics, AI, and automation for the food industry. It's all about the team, seed-to-fork, and it's all in on robotics. That's for everything from agricultural uses, to pizza, to boba making. It's a super-unique method of company creation. We have a team of 32, including the best engineers, including the former Director of Robotics at Boston Robotics, Martin Buehler. We have deep technical expertise. The reason we're focused on food and robotics, is because, traditionally in robotics it's been build it once and use it twice. The thing is, if you're starting a family of robotics for the food industry, you're going to be spending a lot of time developing things like dispensers to put bell peppers onto a pizza. This way, you can use that same dispenser for some other food product, without having to develop a whole new machine and company. For instance, we already have two companies, Graze, developing a commercial lawnmower, and a company called Future Acres, focused on outdoor farming and transportation—where both products use the same vehicle structure with a different payload. Why build that twice, instead, we build these where 80 percent is the same, and only 20 percent is different, depending on the application. That's what's exciting about Wavemaker Labs, we're building multiple companies on the same platform and raising capital into them to enter different industries.
Thanks!