Zume
Food roboticsUSA
New to Unitard
π Dead / Bankrupt
PeakΒ $2.3 BillionToday
~-100%
from peak
- π¦Became a unicorn2018
- πPeak valuation$2.3 Billion β18
- πBecame a Unitard2023
- πΈLast valuationWiped out
π₯ Raised & burned
$445M
Total raised
$152K/day
Burned Β· 8.0y alive
Funding: Wikipedia/Gizmodo
Current status
Shut down 2023
The rise & fall
5 moments Β· 2015β2023The key moments.
2015
2015
Founded to make pizza with robots
Julia Collins and Alex Garden's pitch: robots sauce the pies, and trucks full of ovens finish baking them en route to your door.
Wikipedia
Nov 2018
Nov 2018
The peak: SoftBank buys the robot-pizza dream$2.3B
A $375M SoftBank-led investment values Zume around $2.3B.
Bloomberg
Jan 2020
Jan 2020
The pizza business is toast
Zume cuts hundreds of jobs and abandons pizza entirely β the ovens-on-trucks concept reportedly foundered when the cheese slid in transit β pivoting to sustainable packaging.
TechCrunch
2023
2023
Shuts down β joins the Unitard Club π
The packaging pivot can't outrun the burn: Zume winds down after torching ~$445M, much of it SoftBank's.
Gizmodo
$2.3Bof peak value erased Β· 8 years
How it happened
Zume was a food-robotics startup that aimed to make pizza using robots in delivery trucks, raising a large SoftBank-led investment that pushed its valuation to roughly $2.3B around 2018. It pivoted away from pizza toward sustainable packaging after the robotic model failed to scale, cut staff in 2020, and ultimately shut down in 2023 after burning through its capital.
Source: SoftBank-backed
Where they went
- Alex Gardenfounder, chairman & CEOCEO and Head of Product at Mnemom.ai
Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-19. See our methodology.
