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Havish Gupta
Figuring Out • 2m
Why Did a $4 Billion Pizza Company Fail? So It all started when Alex Garden and Julia Collins thought, why not automate the process of making pizza using robots? With this idea, they started Zume Pizza in 2015 and soon raised $6 million to fund it! Their idea was simple (yet futuristic), make pizzas using robots inside a truck and deliver them to customers manually. While this sounded awesome, they were never able to achieve it. In fact, their first pizza, delivered in 2016, was made using both humans and robots in a normal store and was manually delivered by a human. And what about, as their founder called it, the "baking on the way" truck? That never happened—the idea proved to be 'impractical'! Thus, in 2018, they decided to move away from pizza and decided to license their tech and start selling food packaging instead. They projected $1 billion in sales by 2021 and raised $375 million from SoftBank in 2018 for that. But in the end, nothing went as planned and they just ended up making food packaging. Just like that, a company that aimed to revolutionize pizza delivery using robots, raised $450 million, ended up making pizza boxes—before finally shutting down in 2023.
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