Mezli's CEO Opens Up About Mezli (Eventually) Opening its Autonomous Restaurant Platform

Oh, and the company raised $3M this week.

Mezli, which is developing a fully autonomous standalone restaurants-in-a-box, made headlines this week when it raised $3 million (as first reported by TechCrunch). But when I followed up with Mezli Co-Founder and CEO, Alex Kolchinski by video chat yesterday, I learned something that struck me almost as much as the funding news. That the company is more open to, well, opening up its platform to other restaurant brands.

Whenever I interview a food robot startup, I always ask if they are a food company or a technology company. A food company is using robotics to build its own brand (think: Smyze), while technology companies tend to be content with whitelabeling or using “powered by” on a co-branded machine (think: Blendid/Jamba).

When I first covered Mezli in March of this year, Kolchinski was definitely more on the food company end of the spectrum. As I wrote at the time:

When asked whether Mezli was a technology company or a restaurant company, Kolchinski was quick to say they were de…