Hyphen Raises $24M to Scale Up its Makeline Robot

Company says hundreds of Makelines have been reserved, new orders will be fulfilled in 2024.

The News

• Hyphen, which makes the Makeline robotic makeline for restaurants, announced today that it has raised a $24 million Series A round of funding. This brings the total amount of funding raised by the company to $34.4. million.

• The round was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from Steve Fredette, the Co-founder and President of Toast, as well as existing
  investors including Marc Rowan, Co-founder and CEO of Apollo
  Global Management.

• Hyphen says hundreds of Makelines have been reserved and the company is maxed out on pre-orders right now. Hyphen plans to use the new funds to build out a manufacturing facility in Inglewood, California.

The Story

From the back of a van to a van backing up with millions of dollars, the story of Hyphen is a lesson in learning to adapt. When the company started as Ono Food back in October of 2019, its plan was to outfit vans with smoothie robots. But then the pandemic hit…

Rather than giving up, the team tweaked its technology and resurfaced in August of 2021 with a new name — Hyphen — and a new product — the Makeline — which, as its name suggests, is an automated version of a restaurant’s existing meal makeline.

This was a smart idea, and now Hyphen has $24 million more in the bank to bring its Makeline to the masses. What’s even smarter is how Makeline works.