Jay-Z Places His Cash on Pizza Robotics With Stellar Pizza

• Jay-Z’s enterprise capital agency is placing cash into Stellar Pizza, a model that may use pizza-making robots housed in a meals truck that delivers the pie to the client’s doorstep.
• Stellar Pizza says it should roll out its first truck on the College of Southern California this fall, with extra faculty campuses to comply with.

Associated: Why pizza robots look to be essential instruments for the long run

Can hip-hop icon and entrepreneur Jay-Z flip Stellar Pizza, a robot-powered pizza model from California, right into a family title as well-known as he’s?

We’ll discover out quickly. Stellar Pizza has introduced a $16.5 million Collection A financing spherical led by Jay-Z’s enterprise capital agency, Marcy Enterprise Companions. The agency has invested in different main shopper manufacturers, reminiscent of Savage x Fenty and Therabody.

In line with a press launch, beforehand unannounced fundraising rounds for Stellar Pizza totaled $9 million, led by Root Ventures with participation from Crosslink Capital and Collaborative Fund.

The funding permits Stellar Pizza to make strategic inner investments forward of its launch on the College of Southern California this fall, with further faculty campuses to comply with, in keeping with the corporate.

As PMQ reported final November, Stellar Pizza was based in 2019 by a trio of ex-SpaceX engineers, together with CEO Benson Tsai, who leads the group alongside Brian Langone and James Wahawisan. Tapping into the world-class engineering expertise that Southern California has to supply, the founding Stellar Pizza group is comprised of greater than 30 former SpaceX workers. The rocket science background additionally extends to the culinary division, led by chef Ted Cizma—the previous government chef and director of culinary companies at SpaceX—with artistic oversight from pizza grasp Noel Brohner.

The Stellar Pizza group has created an automatic, touchless machine—housed in an enormous purple meals truck—that bakes pizza from scratch, together with contemporary toppings, in below 5 minutes.

The Stellar Pizza expertise begins as most groundbreaking know-how does: on an app. Instantly after friends order their pizza, a ball of dough is disbursed from the fridge and pressed right into a 12” pie. Home-made sauce and contemporary toppings are added earlier than the pizza is mechanically launched right into a 900° F oven. As soon as the pizza is finished, a conveyor retrieves it from the oven earlier than it’s lower and boxed.

The Stellar Pizza truck has the capability to make 420 pizzas, whereas a single pizza takes lower than 5 minutes to arrange.

As a restaurant that drives on to the client, Stellar Pizza removes the necessity for costly actual property whereas decreasing the price of labor with using compact robotics. Stellar Pizza is within the means of constructing a fleet of cell pizza eating places, with the intention of constructing a nationwide model over the following few years, the corporate stated.