California’s Bear Robotics Nets $81M to Scale Its Waiter Robots

Hospitality technology firm Bear Robotics has raised $81 million in a Series B funding round, the Redwood City, California company announced Tuesday (March 15).

Known for “Servi,” its self-piloting robotic waiter/busser, Bear Robotics has raised a total of $117 million to date. On its blog, the company said Servi has traveled more than 335,000 miles and made more than 28 million deliveries.

Read more: Restaurants Tapping Robot Servers Risk Repeating Past Mistakes

The funding will let its travels extend even further, as Bear Robotics says it will use the capital to enhance its engineering capabilities and expand its solutions across the world.

Bear Robotics has a partnership with Chili’s, providing the restaurant chain with service robots, and has also worked with the Compass Group, Denny’s, Marriott and Pepsi.

“Having started my own restaurant years ago … I thought there must be a way to automate some of these repetitive tasks,” John Ha, the company’s CEO and founder, said in a statement. “Servi [is] a solution meant to enhance the experience of customers, employees, and operators. While others are trying to fully automate work, we’re trying to elevate the future of work for stakeholders in this industry that keep it going each day.”

Among Bear Robotics’ backers is Japan’s SoftBank, which last year halted production on its robot Pepper, which was both a project backed by the bank and a sort of mascot for the company. At the time, the move was seen as a signal that SoftBank was rethinking robotics in favor of more practical and business-centric offerings.

See also: Restaurant Roundup: Robots Take Over Major Casual Dining Chains

Chili’s isn’t the only restaurant chain embracing robotics. As PYMNTS reported last year, the California-based restaurant automation company Miso Robotics and Buffalo Wild Wings teamed up to test the tech company’s robotic chicken wing fryer, Flippy Wings.

“Technology is making a fundamental impact on the end-to-end restaurant operational model,” Paul Brown, CEO of Inspire Brands, which owns the chain. “Intelligent automation including AI and robotics will not only transform how we communicate with and take orders from our guests but also how we prepare and serve food to those guests.”

The company also had plans to install the robot at Inspire Brands’ Alliance Kitchen ghost kitchens, ahead of a consumer-facing debut at Buffalo Wild Wings location this year 2022. Miso has said its research shows that the robot boosts food production speeds by 10% to 20%.