Picnic, a 10-year-old Seattle food automation startup that aims to revolutionize pizza production with robots, has closed and liquidated its assets.
According to legal documents and an email to creditors and investors, Picnic was unable to pay its debts and on May 11 filed for General Liquidation, a state law process that allows an insolvent company to liquidate its assets without bankruptcy. A Santa Monica, Calif.-based liquidator, CMBG Advisors Inc., was named to handle the decline.
“CMBG will work to sell any of the company’s remaining assets and intends to distribute any proceeds after expenses to lenders,” said the email, seen by GeekWire.
In fact, a buyer for those assets and the intellectual property of Picnic has been found, said James Baer, founder and president of CMBG, speaking by phone on Friday afternoon.
“I want to respect privacy, but I will disclose that we have sold the company,” Baer said. He declined to reveal the name of the buyer, the purchase price or what the property was used for.
The development marks a remarkable turnaround for a startup that has raised nearly $50 million and is placing its pizza-making robots in stadiums, universities, and supermarkets across the country. As of Friday, Picnic’s website was live, promoting its latest funding round.
Founded in 2016 by mechanical engineer Garett Ochs as Otto Robotics then Vivid Robotics, Picnic incorporated as Picnic Works, and set out to address one of the most persistent challenges in the food industry: the high cost and inconsistency of manual food preparation. Microsoft founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital was among those who funded the company’s seed round.
Its signature product, the Picnic Pizza Station, can help a single worker produce 100 custom-made 12-inch pizzas an hour by automating the topping process — a pitch aimed squarely at high-volume food service operations struggling with labor costs and profitability.
GeekWire first spotted and tested a robotic pizza maker in 2019 as the company, led at the time by CEO Clayton Wood, came out of stealth mode at its headquarters in Seattle’s Interbay neighborhood.
Picnic continued to raise funding and seek new customers over the next few years with Wood at the helm. The pandemic accelerated the need for manufacturing and delivery as food service was rethought. In 2021, the startup raised $16 million and partnered with Seattle’s Ethan Stowell Restaurants. In 2022, partnership with Domino’s robot-controlled pizza assembly.
“Right now we’re very happy with the other customers we’re talking to in all kinds of categories,” Wood said at the time. “We’re looking at everything — retail, name-brand pizza, major pizza brands, ski resorts, theme parks, grocery stores, managed food service. We’re excited.”
By 2023, Picnic had grown to about 100 employees, but faced economic challenges, struggled to find additional funding, and was forced to downsize. Wood stepped down as CEO that year.
Reached on Friday, Wood recalled that Picnic is “caught on the edge” between the 2018-2019 free cash flow and 2022, “when the bottom comes out of the market.”
The company brought in new CEO Michael Bridges in May 2023 and was able to attract $5 million in new funding, backed by Unlock Venture Partners, a firm led by longtime Seattle entrepreneur and investor Andy Liu.
“Everything they did after that was very secretive, which was unusual for me,” Wood said. “Because everything I was doing was trying to promote it and make it famous.”
The bridges take about two years to complete and will be up and running in July 2025.
Last September, another new CEO came in – Valeri Inting – who was determined to create “the first self-service pizza chain,” with a pop-up planned for New York City earlier this year. But it didn’t happen.
On Friday, GeekWire visited R&D Interbay, a flexible workspace in Seattle’s industrial Interbay neighborhood where Picnic was previously headquartered.
The second floor space was empty. There was no lingering smell of robotic pizza in the air.
Some tenants in the building recalled that Picnic had been collecting goods for the past few months. One remembered tasting pizzas from time to time, while another said the trash cans were full of “interesting things” like engines and other things after they left.
Among those left homeless by Picnic’s death was Lee Kindell, owner and chef at Seattle’s Moto Pizza and an evangelist of kitchen technology. Moto operates eight Seattle locations and is expanding in California.
Kindell was one of Picnic’s first enthusiastic customers, saying that by 2023 “robots are the future of food” as he showcased the Pizza Station at his Belltown location. He told GeekWire this week that he wanted to buy Picnic when he first heard about the company’s financial problems.
When we finally arrived, he said, he was left with a $250,000 “robot aquarium” — his name for the defunct Picnic equipment that now sits in his restaurant.
“I got so angry that I started my own robotics company,” he said, directing Motobotics, a new spin-off from Moto Pizza, to build its own pizza-making machines. He works with the Igor Institute and Fresh Consulting, which is part of the Northwest Robotic Alliance.
But he still has his eye on Picnic – whatever comes next. Regarding the mystery buyer, he said, “I want to know if they’re going to use the IP, or if they’re going to try to resurrect Picnic.”
