Black Female Entrepreneur Nets $48 Million For Robotic Pizza Startup

Julia Collins says she wants her company Zume to make high-quality, affordable food accessible.

Black women are making moves in entrepreneurship. Weeks after two women made crowdfunding history, another Black woman earned $48 million for her robotic pizza startup, Tech Crunch reported.

Zume scores $48 million in funding to expand its robotic pizza empire https://t.co/PlPQKqrOzk by @bheater

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) October 9, 2017

Julia Collins co-founded Zume, which merges automation with the food industry, the news outlet wrote. Designed to disrupt the take-out pizza industry, Zume uses robots to make ready-to-order pizza. According to CNBC, the robots have functionalities that include adding ingredients like pizza sauce and putting the pizzas in the oven. The company has employees on-site to taste test the pizzas and ensure that they meet the customer’s standards.

Zume, which is based in Mountain View, California, currently services parts of the Bay area with hopes to expand. According to Tech Crunch, the company is only $2 million away from reaching its $50 million goal. In December 2016, the company raised $23 million.

In a statement released by Collins and her co-founder Alex Garden, the funding that they received will go toward their market growth and hiring, Tech Crunch reported.

In an interview with The Verge, Collins said Zume’s mission is to solve America’s food problem by making affordable food accessible and to alleviate the labor that workers experience.

“We want to make sure everyone has access to high-quality, affordable food,” she said. “We wanted to identify places where humans were overtaxed physically, bored, or whether the job they were doing was not safe, like sticking their hand into a 600-degree oven for six hours a day.”

According to CNBC, Zume sold its first pizza in 2016 and plans to be available for the entire Bay area by 2018.

Although Zume and other companies have been praised for their innovation, many worry that the use of robots…

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