People love coffee, but don't want to wait for it.

We’ve sat in far too many long and painful drive-thru lines with Rob’s three daughters, receiving inaccurate orders with inconsistent customer service and tipping on top of it all. We set out to solve our own problem because it was clear: nothing about the drive-thru experience today actually works for people on the go.

The experience is so bad that 30% of customers see the long lines and keep on driving. That's $8B in lost sales due to line balk because drive-thru design hasn't kept up with demand.

It's also a struggle for coffee shops to hire and retain baristas, given labor shortages. Understaffing leads to 10%-20% order inaccuracies and limited store hours. Labor issues such as minimum wage requirements and unionization (in Starbucks’ case) are ongoing. Some locations of Dutch Brothers do upwards of $5M in average unit volume a year, yet require 45-50 employees at these locations to fulfill orders. The coffee shop’s already slim margins are disappearing.

Our communities lose out, too. Lines of idling cars not only produce carbon emissions and noise pollution and trash, they also block sidewalks, create parking issues for other businesses and customers, and back up on streets. This is what happens when drive-thru design is stuck in the 1950s.

Yet, drive-thru usage has never been higher, with up to 90% of sales now going through them, especially at drive-thru-only chains like Dutch Brothers and 7Brew. Scooter's Coffee did the math: a store that can shave off just one second of drive-thru wait time gains $30,000 more in additional annual sales.

The math is simple: faster service = more satisfied customers = more profit.

p!ng puts the speed and convenience into fast, delicious coffee and specialty beverages when you’re on the go. Our high-throughput robotics and AI make p!ng the easiest way to pick up your pick-me-up. Every step of the experience is intentionally designed from easy ordering to effortless customization, predictive preparation and delivery, and memorable personal touches like custom AI-generated labels.

Order your favorite drink on our mobile app with one tap, drive to any pod, any time 24/7, and we'll make your customized drink fresh as you arrive. As you pull up, our window auto-adjusts to the height of your car window. All you have to do is grab your drinks and go!

Gone are the days of waiting in line, yelling your order at an intercom, scanning a QR code, or tipping for your morning brew. In fact, you’ll never have to pull your phone out at pick up.

Between our bootstrapped pilot and our newly launched, fully automated p!ng pod, the results are in:

Although customers traveled from all over New England to experience p!ng firsthand, 67% of our orders during our 3-month pilot were from returning customers. Our super users came 30-35 times. They came back because we’re not just a novelty – we’re genuinely better.

See how customers react to their first experience with p!ng:

Our patent-pending, high-throughput system was designed for one purpose: to deliver the best experience. It’s low CAPEX (capital expenditure) too, which gives us scaling advantages.

Our mobile app was developed to be as frictionless as possible. No longer does it take 13 clicks to complete a simple order. p!ng offers customers customization across a wide range of modifications, and our app saves your favorite drink configurations for quick reordering, making your daily coffee side quest a fast, effortless win.

Each pod can make 360 drinks per hour. Each pod has 2 windows serviced by independent robotic workcells. This creates redundancy in case one window/workcell goes down, we can continue to serve customers.

Robotics should be reliable, pragmatic, cost-efficient and above all else, enhance the customer experience. Today’s automated coffee kiosks use robotic arms with unnecessary degrees of freedom to move drinks around to specialized and expensive automated machines that use traditional grind & brew, resulting in coffee grinds and other waste. p!ng’s drink-dispensing robots can be applied flexibly across drink categories and easily modified based on the season, beverage trends, and demand. p!ng’s differentiation from other robotic coffee solutions is that our system is high-throughput, faster, more flexible, and lower cost.

By focusing on customer experience, we solve customer pain points that, in turn, drive business advantages. For example, our machine learning vision system adjusts our automated service windows to the height of the car window so customers can easily grab their drinks. During our pilot, we served 1500 drinks, and not one was spilled. We’ve successfully served many types of vehicles, from low sports cars to fire trucks.

At scale, each p!ng pod generates:

1. $500,000 average unit volume (AUV)
2. 75% less occupancy and labor costs vs traditional coffee chains
3. 4x the throughput
4. 3x the net margin
5. 24/7 operation that captures all drink occasions in addition to morning rush and afternoon treat, meaning measurable incremental revenue

A centralized hub called a commissary supports 10 pods with maintenance, resupply, and 3D-printed parts on demand. Automated inventory monitoring systems will ensure pods are never short of supplies or serving expired inventory.

The p!ng pod’s ultra compact footprint breaks the mold of traditional retail store fronts. Because the pod’s small 120 sq ft footprint is 10x less than that of a traditional suburban coffee shop, our pre-opening, occupancy, and utility costs are much lower. We require only a power hook-up, which is augmented with solar panels on the pod’s roof. We don’t need water, sewer, or a pad site. Pods can be placed in undermonetized sites that cannot accommodate traditional drive-thrus.

p!ng utilizes a simplified robotics-as-a-service licensing model where a licensee can get started with a $150K payment that secures their pod. A monthly fee covers pod maintenance and restock, which is provided by p!ng to ensure a high-quality customer experience, as well as continued innovation and upgrades to the pod, marketing, and site/real estate assistance. Licensees will be responsible for finding and securing locations, providing on-site customer service, and community marketing efforts such as organic social and partnerships. Licensees and p!ng share profits. Licensees will be rigorously vetted as part of the selection process, with customer experience KPIs that must be met. Our RaaS model allows us to maintain quality control of all pods.

There is opportunity for both large operators to buy packages of 5-10 pods, as well as for smaller entrepreneurs to run their own pods, thereby democratizing franchising for all. Today, the costs of setting up a Dunkin is $500K to $1.8M, making p!ng a far more accessible venture.

We have a paid licensee waitlist with licensee interest coming from the US and internationally. Many of our licensees have owned and operated food and beverage companies, as well as restaurants, and understand the challenges within this space.

We've partnered with Cometeer, one of the world’s best coffee technology companies, to bring our customers exceptional coffee. Precision-brewed and flash frozen, every cup is consistently delicious. Their extraction and storage process allows us to ensure we have no waste (nixing traditional grind & brew), which importantly gives us storage capacity advantages within the pod, tightening up our already small footprint.

Our teas, lemonades, and refreshers, for example, are also non-GMO and organic.

We believe our customers' money should go towards delicious, premium ingredients in their cup rather than fancy storefronts or high rents.

Beyond phase 1, we have a range of expansion plans for the brand, technology, and IP that will multiply the value of p!ng, including:

1. White label partnerships with independent cafes and fast food chain. Many cafes and coffee shops have cult followings but cannot add a drive-thru to their existing retail location because of cost or physics, and small parking lots make it hard for their pick–up only patrons to stop in. Partnering with these small businesses to offload their demand benefits them by capturing additional sales and making the experience better for their customer. We serve as the platform to give them an extra advantage. Concurrently we see opportunities to work with large chains to modernize their drive-thru experience.
2. Mobile trailers for festivals and concerts
3. Walk-up formats for urban environments
4. Rural expansion into coffee deserts where traditional shops can't survive economically

Our complementary experiences make us unstoppable. The technical expertise Rob gained from iRobot and Amazon Robotics and his food service background is balanced by Jane’s customer experience (CX) and product/brand marketing experience. We first met working on the same product team at SharkNinja developing and launching kitchen appliances. We do a lot of customer testing and feedback analysis to ensure that customers find value in p!ng. We build fast too -- we launched our pilot in 8 months and designed and built our fully autonomous pod in 11 months.

Our backers: a deep bench of advisors, partners, and investors across robotics, real estate, and coffee franchising. Many former and current founders and operators who have been exactly where we are.

We used to pitch to venture capitalists who didn’t understand the problem we were trying to solve. Some of them had assistants who would grab coffee for them and others had elaborate at-home setups to make espresso. But, many of our customers, partners, and supporters ask us how they can invest because they live the problems that we solve for every day, and they believe in what we’re building and our mission. We’d love for our believers to be owners and share in the success of growing a brand that does things differently.

We bootstrapped our pilot with $200,000 of our own savings, then raised a $635,000 pre-seed round (combo of equity and equity for services) to develop and launch a fully autonomous pod. We’ve run complex, multi-million dollar programs before and we’ve proven we are scrappy founders who achieve key milestones quickly and cost effectively.

Forward-looking projections are not guaranteed.

Your investment will help us build three more pods in 2026 that will include all of our lessons learned from past builds. We’ll use these pods as the foundation for our hub-and-spoke operational model so we’re ready to scale up with our licensees in 2027. Like our current location, these pods will be placed in high-traffic commercial zones in the southern NH/northern MA area, allowing us to validate our hub-and-spoke-model.

We’ll be focused on KPIs such as line speed, optimizing average unit volume per pod, and of course, customer experience-focused metrics such as net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and other key metrics.

p!ng puts the customer at the heart of everything through scalable robotics. From day one, we’ve always wanted p!ng to stand for progress, accessibility, and customer service commitment.

Join us as we build the future of convenience - fast, effortless, and human-centered.