Inside Piestro, the Robotics Startup Serving Pizza With the Touch of a Button

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow 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.

Piestro founder and CEO Massimo De Marco
Photo by Decerry Donato

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It’s 2 a.m. during a night out; you’re hungry, but all kitchens are closed and the food options are limited.

Piestro believes it has a solution. The El Segundo-based startup is developing a fully robotic vending machine for pizzas.


“You generally don't get really good or fresh foods [late at night],” Piestro founder and CEO Massimo De Marco said. “But being able to bring in something nice, fresh, hot and I want to say healthy—that was really the main factor we're wanting to bring to the masses 24/7.”

Before founding Piestro in 2020, Italy native De Marco helped launch Pasadena-based food delivery platform Kitchen United and had hospitality industry stints working for restaurateur Wolfgang Puck and the Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills. To make his dream of an automated pizza machine a reality, De Marco has the help of a team of engineers with experience from the likes of Walt Disney Imagineering, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Boston Dynamics and Virgin Hyperloop.

Piestro founder and CEO Massimo De Marco examines the startup's pizza-making machine.

Photo by Decerry Donato

Piestro founder and CEO Massimo De Marco examines the startup's pizza-making machine.

(Though he works remotely, De Marco said he spends at least one day a week in Piestro’s El Segundo facility overseeing the team and taste-testing the pizza. When asked about his daily slice count, he admitted: “I don’t count because I’m embarrassed!”)

Standing six feet tall and nine feet wide, Piestro’s machine is built with a glass window allowing customers to watch the process unfold inside. It’s similar to chains like Blaze Pizza or Pieology, where the pizza is made by workers in an assembly line—except Piestro’s machine requires no workers to produce a pie in a matter of minutes.

“We wanted to make that experience more interactive and show you that this is fresh stuff,” said Piestro engineer Darian Ahler—who also runs his own food automation startup, Bobacino. “You're not getting some frozen pizza sitting there; you're able to see your pizza constructed right in front of you, and that's super exciting and gets people more engaged with the brand.”

Piestro customers are updated on the status of their pizza via a screen.Piestro customers are updated on the status of their pizza via a screen.Photo by Decerry Donato

Piestro lets customers order through a touchscreen that lets them choose the toppings for their pizza. (The machine can hold six to eight different toppings at a time.) Once they pay, the customer’s name pops up on a screen indicating when the pie will be ready. The entire process usually takes anywhere from five to eight minutes, though Piestro wants to bring that down to four minutes.

De Marco said the company has already received more than 4,000 pre-orders for its automated pizza machine, with woodfired pizza chain 800 Degrees among its clientele. (De Marco declined to disclose the price Piestro is charging per machine.) Piestro believes its product is ideal for hospitals, airports, schools and apartment complexes that could use access to prepared food at all hours of the day.

The startup isn’t the only automated pizza game in town; there’s also Stellar Pizza, a Hawthorne-based robotic food truck founded by former SpaceX engineers. While Stellar’s model offers mobility, Piestro’s “hub-and-spoke model” has its own advantages, Ahler said.

After a pizza is ready to be picked up, the Piestro machine stores it in a compartment where it is kept warm.After a pizza is ready to be picked up, the Piestro machine stores it in a compartment where it is kept warm. Photo by Decerry Donato

Though Santa Monica-based food-tech incubator Wavemaker Labs is Piestro’s lead investor, the company proudly boasts of the thousands of investors it has amassed through two separate equity crowdfunding campaigns. Piestro has raised more than $6 million in funding with the help of those campaigns, and is currently seeking to raise another $20 million to help scale its business.

De Marco noted that the startup’s crowdfunding investors include former food industry colleagues of his, from waiters to bartenders, who “totally understand this industry” and the value of the automation Piestro is looking to achieve.

“A busboy that worked with me 15 years ago told me he invested $1,000,” according to De Marco. “They want to get involved and feel like they're part of this new robotic revolution.”

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How the 'Thrift Haul' Boosted Secondhand Ecommerce Platforms

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
How the 'Thrift Haul' Boosted Secondhand Ecommerce Platforms
Evan Xie

If you can believe it, it’s been more than a decade since rapper Macklemore extolled the virtues of thrift shopping in a viral music video. But while scouring the ranks of vintage clothing stores looking for the ultimate come-up may have waned in popularity since 2012, the online version of this activity is apparently thriving.

According to a new trend story from CNBC, interest in “reselling” platforms like Etsy-owned Depop and Poshmark has exploded in the years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. In an article that spends a frankly surprising amount of time focused on sellers receiving death threats before concluding that they’re “not the norm,” the network cites the usual belt-tightening ecommerce suspects – housebound individuals doing more of their shopping online coupled with inflation woes and recession fears – as the causes behind the uptick.

As for data, there’s a survey from Depop themselves, finding that 53% of respondents in the UK are more inclined to shop secondhand as living costs continue to rise. Additional research from Advance Market Analytics confirms the trend, citing not just increased demand for cheap clothes but the pressing need for a sustainable alternative to recycling clothing materials at its core.

The major popularity of “thrift haul” videos across social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok has also boosted the visibility of vintage clothes shopping and hunting for buried treasures. Teenage TikToker Jacklyn Wells scores millions of views on her thrift haul videos, only to get routinely mass-accused of greed for ratching up the Depop resell prices for her coolest finds and discoveries. Nonetheless, viral clips like Wells’ have helped to embed secondhand shopping apps more generally within online fashion culture. Fashion and beauty magazine Hunger now features a regular list of the hottest items on the re-sale market, with a focus on how to use them to recreate hot runway looks.

As with a lot of consumer and technology trends, the sudden surge of interest in second-hand clothing retailers was only partly organic. According to The Drum, ecommerce apps Vinted, eBay, and Depop have collectively spent around $120 million on advertising throughout the last few years, promoting the recent vintage shopping boom and helping to normalize second-hand shopping. This includes conventional advertising, of course, but also deals with online influencers to post content like “thrift haul” videos, along with shoutouts for where to track down the best finds.

Reselling platforms have naturally responded to the increase in visibility with new features (as well as a predictable hike in transaction fees). Poshmark recently introduced livestreamed “Posh Shows” during which sellers can host auctions or provide deeper insight into their inventory. Depop, meanwhile, has introduced a “Make Offer” option to fully integrate the bartering and negotiation process into the app, rather than forcing buyers and sellers to text or Direct Message one another elsewhere. (The platform formerly had a comments section on product pages, but shut this option down after finding that it led to arguments, and wasn’t particularly helpful in making purchase decisions.)

Now that it’s clear there’s money to be made in online thrift stores, larger and more established brands and retailers are also pushing their way into the space. H&M and Target have both partnered with online thrift store ThredUp on featured collections of previously-worn clothing. A new “curated” resale collection from Tommy Hilfiger – featuring minorly damaged items that were returned to its retail stores – was developed and promoted through a partnership with Depop, which has also teamed with Kellogg’s on a line of Pop-Tarts-inspired wear. J.Crew is even bringing back its classic ‘80s Rollneck Sweater in a nod to the renewed interest in all things vintage.

Still, with any surge of popularity and visibility, there must also come an accompanying backlash. In a sharp editorial this week for Arizona University’s Daily Wildcat, thrift shopping enthusiast Luke Lawson makes the case that sites like Depop are “gentrifying fashion,” stripping communities of local thrift stores that provide a valuable public service, particularly for members of low-income communities. As well, UK tabloids are routinely filled with secondhand shopping horror stories these days, another evidence point as to their increased visibility among British consumers specifically, not to mention the general dangers of buying personal items from strangers you met over the internet.

How to Startup: Mission Acquisition

Spencer Rascoff

Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.

How to Startup: Mission Acquisition

Numbers don’t lie, but often they don’t tell the whole story. If you look at the facts and figures alone, launching a startup seems like a daunting enterprise. It seems like a miracle anyone makes it out the other side.

  • 90% of startups around the world fail.
  • On average, it takes startups 2-3 years to turn a profit. (Venture funded startups take far longer.)
  • Post-seed round, fewer than 10% of startups go on to successfully raise a Series A investment.
  • Less than 1% of startups go public.
  • A startup only has a .00006% chance of becoming a unicorn.

Ouch.

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From The Vault: VC Legend Bill Gurley On Startups, Venture Capital and Scaling

Spencer Rascoff

Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.

Bill Gurley in a blue suit
Bill Gurley

This interview was originally published on December of 2020, and was recorded at the inaugural dot.LA Summit held October 27th & 28th.

One of my longtime favorite episodes of Office Hours was a few years ago when famed venture capitalist Bill Gurley and I talked about marketplace-based companies, how work-from-home will continue to accelerate business opportunities and his thoughts on big tech and antitrust.

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