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Rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z has picked up yet another local investment. (As you’ll recall, he’s not a businessman but a business, man, so this makes some sense.) His latest find is mobile automated pizza delivery startup Stellar Pizza, a “restaurant on wheels” that can fully prepare a pizza in five minutes and churn out around 420 total pies per day. Hova led Stellar’s latest $16.5 million funding round through his company, Marcy Venture Partners (MVP).

If you’re thinking this is some old-school pizza truck with a robot arm installed as a gimmick or what have you, think again. Stellar comes from former SpaceX engineers Benson Tsai, Brian Langone, and James Wahawisan, who worked with a team of around 20 fellow designers for two years on the project (along with a culinary director and expert dough consultant, of course).

It sounds unconventional, but a pizza machine actually presented a lot of opportunities for automation. As a “closed loop,” the technology is relatively self-contained and a reliably repeatable process. Matthew Kang of Eater, who has seen a demo, describes the pizza-making as something of an assembly line, more akin to a Rube Goldberg contraption than an actual free-standing pizza-making robot.

The process begins when a crane grabs a ball of dough and places it onto a conveyor belt, which then begins pressing and kneading it to form a pizza shape. Similar technology is also used at more conventional human-staffed pizza chains, such as Blaze Pizza. Sauce, cheese, and toppings are then added by a series of arms, with a particular focus on America’s favorite pizza topping, pepperoni: The machine holds 19 full pepperoni sausages when fully stocked, and uses a horizontal guillotine-type device to slice them directly on top of the pizzas themselves. (Other more easy-to-place toppings flow through simple tubes.) The completed pies are then baked in one of four ovens, stacked into a tower at the end of the device, and output for a human worker to slice and place into a box for serving.

As concerns about a labor shortage continue to mount, innovative kitchen re-designs involving automation are spreading to restaurants and food service companies across all cuisines and niches. But with its relative simplicity and runaway popularity, pizza is proving a particularly attractive market for founders and designers. Americans consume around 3 billion pizzas a year, at a cost of around $46 billion annually, so it’s obvious why companies like Stellar would want to grab a slice of this market.

Still, Stellar isn’t the only player in the automated pizza game. The Bay Area’s Basil Street designs 22 square-feet automated pizza kitchens, which are physically modeled on conventional brick ovens; the company has tested five units so far in California, Texas, North Carolina and Nevada. El Segundo-based Piestro makes pizza vending machines in which the pies are assembled and cooked automatically. Earlier this summer, the company teamed up with delivery robot designers Serve for a totally contactless end-to-end robotic pizza delivery system. That’s right, a Serve robot can deliver up to four Piestro pizzas that have never been besmirched by human hands.

Though the pizza-making process itself has been deconstructed and reimagined by the ground up – with machines capable of outputting a fresh pie faster than even the quickest Domino's delivery driver – the real deciding factor on a lot of automated food companies may end up being intangibles like flavor and presentation. Silicon Valley’s automated pizzeria Zume famouly took a $375 million investment from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, betting that pizza-bots could prep and deliver better pies at a faster clip than human workers. But the company struggled to create a worthy and compelling finished product. (Zume pizzas faced a number of complaints, from not enough sauce on the pie to holes in the pizzas themselves.)

Which is to say, a “normal”—but not exactly mind-blowing pizza—may be good enough considering the convenience and the relatively cheap price point; a cheese pizza from Stellar only runs $7, and up to $10 for a fully-loaded pie. But if automation is going to move beyond a fun gimmick and into a true food revolution, you’ve got to hope that companies find a way to bring exciting flavors and pizza experiences to the table, rather than just lower costs and quicker-than-expected prep times. — Lon Harris