
Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
XQ&A: Bobacino CEO Darian Ahler Makes His Case for Food Automation
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

After a year and a half of the pandemic, the robots have arrived—at least in restaurants.
A new report from market research firm Global Industry Analysts (GIA) found that the global food automation market grew to $9.7 billion in 2020, spurred in part by a desire to offer customers contactless service. The GIA researchers projected the market would swell to $13.6 billion by 2026.
While food automation offers an exciting new avenue for entrepreneurs, there's also a fear that machines will ultimately replace their human counterparts. (Food service is far from the only industry to grapple with the threat of automation.)
Darian Ahler, CEO of Bobacino.
But Darian Ahler doesn't see it that way. The 37-year-old director of product strategy and food automation at Wavemaker labs and CEO of Santa Monica-based Bobacino insists that automation will automate those dreaded tasks and provide a contactless option amid the pandemic.
Ahler argues that his $50,000 boba making-machine will elevate food service, bringing fast, quick specialty drinks to mom-and-pop stores and in the process eliminate lines. (The first Bobacino pod is expected in early 2022.) And he says his new deal with a facial recognition software, PopID will offer consumers a quicker and safer way to pay.
Ahler spoke with dot.LA about Bobacino and the future of food automation.
The technology for automating food service has been around a while, but big companies have been slow to adopt it. Why is that?
If you look at it historically, automation is trying to streamline functionality and production in the food space. New York in the early 1940s and 50s had the automat.
They were building and making meals in the background and then you would go and grab a mac and cheese or a cheesecake at one of these lockers. That ended because people wanted to see their food made fresh in front of them.
Fast forward to today. There is the taboo that automation is replacing human labor. I understand the concern, but it's a bit of a misnomer. What we're trying to do is really automate those less desirable tasks, we're automating the process not the people.
Do you see automation changing the face of restaurants?
To some degree, for sure. I don't think we're going to fast forward 50 years from now and all restaurants are going to be robotic. I think it will be a continued fusion between the two.
Think about how much a kitchen has been automated over time when you have specific machines to do specific tasks rather than having somebody cook a stew. You might do that in an instapot, and that can speed up the process.
We're going to continue to see that trend. We're on the forefront of it. We're not trying to automate away the restaurant. We're trying to automate certain processes so that existing brick and mortars can have their employees do their jobs better.
The trend that I've been seeing that might be changing the structure of restaurants is the growing advent of ghost kitchens—leveraging one kitchen that might serve multiple restaurants for delivery. So removing the front of house for certain restaurants, seeing the delivery sector grow massively.
Many people are worried that technology like yours will replace human workers. What do you say to those critics?
So, it's a little bit of a misnomer. We're not trying to automate jobs, we're trying to automate processes. The difference being that we're not trying to replace people, we want to replace portions of their functions. For example, as an employee, what they're having to do is extremely tedious. We can [allow them] to focus on the customer.
With an existing boba shop, a lot of the overhead goes to labor but a good chunk of it just goes to rent, paying for the bills of utilities and the support of the space itself. With our model, being able to partner with small business owners, we can start to create a hub-and-spoke network where they can have an existing shop and they can drop 3, 5, 8, 10 of our Bobacino units.
We can deploy these out around their space and they're able to have a larger reach and larger impact without requiring the footprint or the utilities or the cost required with a brick and mortar.
How would a customer order a drink using your boba machine and the PopID technology?
If there's a long line, but you want one of the classic drinks you can go to the Bobacino pod and order one there. Everything is staged and ready to go to make your drink. If you want a traditional milk tea with boba, you walk up to our ordering interface which is a tablet with integration of PopID. If you are registering with PopID—which is an opt-in solution—you would opt-in to the process and then scan your face for payment.
You'll see the robotic arm come to life and grab a cup and bring it to the boba dispenser. Then it will deliver your drink to one of the secure pickup locations. If you have PopID, you go to that kiosk and have it scan your face and open the door. If you don't, then we provide a QR code or pin to access the drink and make sure they're getting their drink and nobody else's.
If you want a more custom drink then you wait in line and have a person build that drink for you. That can help expand the company's production and ability to serve more drinks faster without needing a larger footprint which seems to be one of the biggest issues.
Was there pushback on the price of the machine?
Nobody pushed back on it. The other part here is that we are offering leasing options, for those people that can't come up with $50,000 of liquid capital. It would be a monthly spend and that is a little bit more tangible and should have a faster return on investment even though they might be paying that out over a longer period of time.
What other projects do you have going on aside from boba?
I occupy this dual role because I came in as CEO of Bobacino, and that was partially on the business development side and partially on the product development side. But I have now fully embedded myself into Wavemaker labs as Director of Product Strategy for food automation. I work across our portfolio companies.
So we have another company called Piestro which makes pizza from scratch. We have another concept that we are developing called Nommi, it's a bowl-based concept. So I help inform across all those channels, not only with the experience, but with the functionality with my background as an engineer.
Your Bobacino prototype is up and running, correct?
Yeah, it's at our headquarters. We're not really showing it off for demos yet.
We wanted to be able to develop a unit so we could show people what we're making for our equity crowdfunding campaign, but also it was for validation. We built this in six months with hardware that is super fast from initial concept to deployment, and it will make the drink, top to bottom, which is super fun!
I will fully admit that the drink can be improved and the process can be improved. But first, we made it fast. This next version is making it good, and excited to get those first units out in front of people and get some real feedback.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the names of food startups Piestro and Nommi.
- Coco Food Delivery Joins the Robot Race - dot.LA ›
- The Rise of Robotics in Los Angeles - dot.LA ›
- Miso Robotics Is Preparing to Launch a $40M Series D Raise - dot.LA ›
- KPOP Foods Acquired By Korean Food Retailer Wooltari USA - dot.LA ›
- Yami Raises $50 Million to Sell Asian Snacks and More Online - dot.LA ›
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.
Activision Buys Game Studio Proletariat To Expand ‘World of Warcraft’ Staff
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Blizzard intends to acquire Proletariat, a Boston-based game studio that developed the wizard-themed battle royale game “Spellbreak.”
VentureBeat first reported that the Santa Monica-based publisher was exploring a purchase, noting its ongoing mission to expand the staff working on Blizzard’s hit massively multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft,” which launched in 2004.
Proletariat’s team of roughly 100 people will be merged into Activision’s “World of Warcraft” team to work on its upcoming expansion game. Though there’s no release date as yet for the title, “World of Warcraft: Dragonflight” is expected to debut before the end of this year.
Activision did not immediately return a request for comment. Financial terms of the deal were not available.
This Proletariat deal is Activision's latest push to consolidate its family tree by folding its subsidiary companies in under the Blizzard banner. More than 15 years after it bought out New York-based game developer Vicarious Visions, Activision merged the business into its own last year, ensuring that the studio wouldn’t work on anything but Blizzard titles.
The deal could also have implications for workers at Activision who have looked to unionize. One subsidiary of Activision, Wisconsin-based Raven Software, cast a majority vote to establish its Game Workers Alliance—backed by the nationwide Communications Workers of America union—in May.
Until recently, Activision has remained largely anti-union in the face of its employees organizing—but it could soon not have much of a say in the matter once it finalizes its $69 billion sale to Microsoft, which said publicly it would maintain a “neutral approach” and wouldn’t stand in the way if more employees at Activision expressed interest in unionizing after the deal closes.
Each individual studio under the Activision umbrella would need to have a majority vote in favor of unionizing to join the GWA. Now, Proletariat’s workforce—which, somewhat ironically given its name, isn’t unionized—is another that could make such a decision leading up to the Microsoft deal’s expected closing in 2023.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Snap Officially Launching ‘Snapchat Plus’ Subscription Tier
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Snap is officially launching Snapchat Plus, a paid subscription plan on Santa Monica-based social media company’s flagship app.
Snap is now the latest media company to tack a “plus” to the end of its name—announcing Wednesday that the new service will provide users with “exclusive, experimental and pre-release features” for the price of $3.99 a month. The first features available to paying subscribers include the ability to customize the style of app’s icon, pin a “BFF” to the top of their chat history and see which users have rewatched a story, according to The Verge.
The new product arrives after Snap confirmed reports earlier this month that it was testing Snapchat Plus—though the version that it has rolled out does not incorporate the rumored feature that would allow subscribers to view a friend’s whereabouts over the previous 24 hours.
Snapchat Plus will initially be available to users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While certain features will remain exclusive to Plus users, others will eventually be released across Snapchat’s entire user base, Snap senior vice president of product Jacob Andreou told The Verge. (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)
The subscription tier introduces a new potential revenue stream for Snap, which experienced a “challenging” first quarter marked by disruptions to its core digital advertising market. However, Andreou told The Verge that the product is not expected to be a “material new revenue source” for the company. He also disputed that Snap was responding to its recent economic headwinds, noting that Snap had been exploring a paid offering since 2016.
Despite charging users, Snapchat Plus does not include the option to turn off ads. “Ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term,” Andreou said.
Snap is not the first popular social media platform to venture into subscriptions: Both Twitter and Tumblr rolled out paid tiers last year, albeit with mixedresults.Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui On How Small Funds Can Better Support Young Founders
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui talks about why he moved earlier stage in his investing and how investors can best support founders.
Lui joined his friend—and first angel investor—Ben Ling as a general partner at Bling Capital, which focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage funding rounds. The desire to work in earlier funding stages alongside someone he knew well drew him away from his role as a partner at multi-billion-dollar venture firm DCM, where he was part of the team that invested in Musical.ly, now known as TikTok.
Bling primarily focuses on entrepreneurs looking to raise around $1 million to $3 million who are often early in their careers as founders. Lui said Bling evaluates companies on characteristics that go beyond whether they like the founder or feel that the market looks good. Instead, he said they take a hard look at the available company data, and quickly respond.
“And we send it back to them and say, ‘Okay, this is what's working, what's not working’,” Lui said. “And then create the playbook for them on how to find product market fit and get to like, ‘These are the milestones you actually need to hit’.”
When considering companies, Lui said Bling looks at the founder, the market, the company’s current traction and differentiation while asking the founder the questions they would expect to get at Series A and Series B funding rounds.
“One thing that I really admire about what [Ling’s] built with Bling is the consistency and the processes and playbooks— everything from the way that we evaluate deals to the way that we work with our portfolio companies,” Lui said. “Everything is kind of around playbooks and operationalizing things and also iterating to do those processes better.”
As part of its work to support founders, Bling maintains an extensive product council, which connects tech executives with the founders in Bling’s portfolio. Bling also has created numerous self-serve resources for founders so they can easily tap into the fund’s network and shared knowledge.
“We have a bunch of playbooks that we introduce to companies around how to hire efficiently, how to negotiate with counterparties, how to think about the founding team, business development…We just have these different things that we start to train our entrepreneurs on,” Lui said.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.