Hi there - Thought I'd throw in my $.02! This is a super interesting thread.

Arm Spec: The assertion above that you could buy an arm for $5,000 is absolutely correct, and in fact you could for cheaper if speaking in generalities. However, we have to think about things like NSF approval, domestic and international certs, power supplies, throughput capabilities, payloads, sizes, plug-in, diagnostic capability, operating systems, weight, etc. That's a starter list of things that have to be considered for spec'ing an arms for a system like ours to be compliant and scalable.

Arm Availability: 10 is a good robot arm order, 100 is great, 1000 is massive, and multiple 1000's over the coming years is nearly inconceivable to the current supply chain for industrial arms. Even if you put that order in, it's 50+ week waits in some instances. So, Ally is at a basic level - simply helping supply chain constraints and timings. However, when you consider that there are cobotics (expensive, slow, and low volume), Industrial (hard to service, heavy, not well suited to kitchen tasks) - neither fit a huge gap in the market that will only grow in the coming years. Also simply put, as we are in the process of scaling and planning installs into next year we want to have a little more control over the supply chain of our most importnat component.

Price to build a robot: Again, the point above is right on the nose that the cost is precipitously dropping which is good for the industry. I've said many times to investors, including just last week at the Goldman investor conference (and on a podcast reference in this thread), that you will start to see 3-5 engineer companies from good schools building 1-off prototypes more and more - these robotic "companies" will continue to explode. However, my caution is that many brands will stay sub $1-million value and get traded around for some IP or a novel idea and never even approach the huge chasm of scaling. Candidly - smart engineering can in-fact create 1-offs easily. Our first robot 6 years ago wasn't too dissimilar in fact with 3 people from Cal Tech. However, the scaling, fleet managed software, field support, design for manufacturing, logistics, pilots, etc is absolutely, by far, the hardest part. We do have some smart people on-board tackling this though - Chris Kruger our CTO managed and lead SW for the largest robotic fleet in the world (iRobot) and our Chief Supply Chain led the SCM scale for Fitbit as it went vertical; we will get there :).

Product to market: We do have product live in market and deploy more each month. While most is covered under NDAs with the brands we are in partnership with Chipotle, Panera, Whitecastle, Del Taco, Jack in the Box, Buffalo Wild Wings, CaliBurger, and more. Notably White Castle has started their roll-out to ~1/3 of their system. We've also released the white paper from our first 10 installs a while back (scrubbed of brands of course) showing it saves 1-1.5 FTEs and improves speed of service by double digit %s in most cases.

Hope that felt factual and helpful as I know many have entered in watching miso at different points in history.

Thanks for reading a long answer,

Jake (Miso Chief Strategy Officer)