Building Real Solutions for Restaurants, One Robot at a Time

Before I worked in robotics, I worked in restaurants: washing dishes, prepping food, serving tables, and running the fry station. I know what it feels like to be slammed with orders, trying to keep it together for customers and act like everything’s fine (when it’s definitely not). It’s a humbling and character-building experience that teaches you how to stay composed, solve problems fast, and keep a team moving under pressure. That early experience shaped how I think about operations and also gave me the perspective needed to see where robotics can have the greatest impacts.

Restaurants are one of the most common small businesses, and as such are an amazing tool for economic mobility in the US. Restaurants are where communities gather, local economies grow, and bring the flavor and vitality that make cities truly livable. For too long, restaurant operators have been overlooked by the robotics industry. While billions of dollars have poured into AI SaaS companies, mostly building software for other tech companies, restaurants have been left behind. At Pinto, we’re changing that.

Lessons from the Autonomous Vehicle Industry

At Toyota Research Institute and Motional, I led operations teams for self-driving car programs. Autonomous vehicles are incredibly complex, requiring billions in funding, thousands of engineers, and years of R&D.

I learned an important lesson along the way: not every technological breakthrough solves an immediate need. People want safer roads, but no one was necessarily asking to replace their Uber drivers with expensive self-driving cars.

Many companies in this industry aimed straight for fully driverless Level 5 robotaxis from day one. That approach led to years of development and massive investment without a product ready for mass adoption. In hindsight, starting with a more practical Level 2 or Level 3 self-driving system could have improved road safety, generated revenue sooner, and built trust with customers.

That experience shaped how we think at Pinto. We’re taking the opposite approach: starting with small, tangible problems that make a real impact today, and using that foundation to build toward more advanced solutions over time.

Solving the “Small” Problems That Matter Most

Our first product, PODS, tackles one of the least glamorous yet most universal pain points in the kitchen: filling and packaging sauce cups. On paper, it seems small, but anyone who’s worked in a restaurant knows how much time this takes. What may seem trivial to outsiders is a daily bottleneck for restaurant teams. We know the industry, and we take it seriously.

Restaurants have been asking for simple, practical automation to solve their everyday challenges for years; yet they’ve been largely ignored by the tech world. If we can throw billions at automating cars, there’s no reason we can’t apply a fraction of that effort toward helping restaurant owners manage rising wages and low margins.

Building hardware is never easy, but that’s what makes it meaningful. From rapid prototyping to sourcing to manufacturing, our team knows what it takes to bring our robots out of the lab and into kitchens. By prioritizing quality and speed in equal measure, we aim to deliver automation at the pace restaurants need; ultimately setting a new standard for how quickly practical robotics can help the people who need them most.

At Pinto, that’s the future we’re building.

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