Jay-Z has his fingers in many different pies, and his latest venture sees him investing in pies of the pizza variety but made by a robot.
Stellar Pizza hopes its automated, robotic pizza truck will become the future of pizza delivery. The startup announced on Monday (Oct. 3) that Marcy Venture Partners, Jay-Z’s venture capital firm, invested $16.5 million.
The former SpaceX engineer founders, Benson Tsai, Brian Langone, and James Wahawisan, along with 20 other fellow SpaceX employees, bring together a combined 100 years of rocket science experience to the venture.
The robot food truck can create a fresh pizza from scratch with selected toppings in under five minutes. Customers order the gourmet pies via an app, and the machine prepares, bakes, boxes, and cuts the pizza. A launch is slated at the University of California this Fall. Check out the process in the video below.
“What we’re trying to do is very hard,” said Tsai as per TECHEBLOG. “I needed to recruit the best and the brightest to develop a mobile pizza machine that is basically a spaceship on wheels. I can’t even count the number of pizzas I’ve eaten.”
Native New Yorker Jay-Z takes his pizza seriously, as he revealed during a 2015 interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live. His favorite New York slice comes from Lucali, a pizzeria in Brooklyn.
When asked to explain his wife Beyoncé‘s unconventional pizza topping preference of extra tomato sauce and jalapeños, Hov avoided the question. “She’s from Houston, first of all,” Jay-Z explained while laughing. “They don’t have pizza there. That explains everything.”