Alex Gruebele

I co-founded Mezli in 2020 with two friends from Stanford. Our aim was to bring down the cost of healthy convenient food by producing autonomous restaurants that were both cheaper to run and build than a fast-casual restaurant. We were in YCombinator’s W21 batch, raised a seed round, and deployed a fully functioning unit at Spark Social in San Francisco in August 2022.

That fall, the unit served ~10,000 meals (over 50% being return customers!) with over 99% uptime, and under 2 hours per day of labor to stock, empty, and clean. It could serve 250-300 meals per day between human intervention, at a rate of 75 per hour, and all bowls were customizable and heated up on demand. The one-off was approved to serve by the SF-DPH with an NSF Field Label, and cost $450K to build, with the second one to come in at $250K.

We went out to raise a series A of $14M in January 2023 to design the unit for scaled manufacture, and build a handful more to expand the chain (a hub and spoke model where many units are filled and serviced by a central commissary kitchen). Unfortunately, the funding market and interest rates took a turn, and with our high-capex hardware costs, we were unable to raise the round. After exploring serving other chains’ menus as a b2b2c play, and considering a pivot to smaller and cheaper units, we ran out of runway and had to shut down the company in the summer.

I was the CTO — I grew and led our engineering team, and designed our technical milestones and how to get there. I also spent much of my time as a mechanical engineer, designing systems like the modular shell and the ingredient cartridge system. I learned a ton from my colleagues and our advisors about engineering, the startup world, and how the restaurant industry works. It was a pleasure, and everyone on the team is an A-player and I highly recommend working with any them.

Below I’ve included some media and blogs (coming soon) about we made, as a kind of Mezli archive to share with folks interested and future people I work with :)

Blogs (coming soon)

Starter tips for building a robot restaurant