Zume, the firm that used robots to serve pizza and raised close to $500 million, has shut down. The startup, which was established in 2015 with the intention of automating the pizza-making process, encountered numerous technological challenges.
The company later modified its business strategy and made an effort to provide sustainable packaging. Despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including Softbank and AME Cloud Ventures, according to Crunchbase, Zume failed.
The Information said that Zume was “insolvent,” and that Sherwood Partners, a restructuring company, had been hired to sell the business’s assets. It stopped trading in May, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
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According to Bloomberg, Zume had difficulty preventing issues like melted cheese from sliding off their pizzas while they were cooking in moving vehicles. Due to its issues, there were numerous well-known departures and financial issues.
According to a prior report by Insider, it made a number of layoffs in 2020, eliminating more than 500 jobs, including those for all of its robotics and food-delivery truck operations. In a leaked email, Cofounder and CEO Alex Garden blamed the employment losses on a number of funding opportunities that had fallen through as well as the pandemic’s economic effects.
