A robotic bartender named Monsieur and his human partners have raised $2 million in seed investment from BIP Capital with Base Ventures, Paul Judge, TechSquare Labs, NFL star Derrick Morgan, and NBA star Glen Davis. The funding will go towards building more Monsieur drink robots for bars, restaurants, and my bedroom.
“We are in pilot with several NBA arenas, one of the top hotel brands that has over 4,000 locations, and a popular movie theater brand that has over 500 locations. Monsieur will be in at least 3 NBA arenas this basketball season. Those arenas have a total capacity of over 110,000 attendees,” said co-founder and CEO Barry Givens.
As you’ll recall, Monsieur launched at TechCrunch Disrupt and is essentially a black box full of booze. You program in a drink – a Manhattan or a Slippery Wapdoodle With A Twist – and the machine mixes the drink in proper proportion and squirts it into a glass. The whole system runs on an Android tablet and a set of pumps and can be upgraded and controlled remotely. You can think of it as a robot bartender that will never talk back and can programmatically buy you a shot.
“The idea came when I was waiting for his drink to come at a popular restaurant chain. He was there with his friends to watch a playoff basketball game and did not get his first drink until halftime. At that moment he realized that there was an opportunity to develop something that could provide consumers with a better experience but also help the businesses get drinks out faster to increase drink sales,” said Givens.
The team has deployed beta units at restaurants and bars in Atlanta and they’re working on partnerships with drink brands and sports arenas. They see this as sort of a “bartender in a box” that staff can roll into a room and let users order drinks without having staff on hand. The system maintains a log of what was served and the venue can ring up a bill at the end of the night. I’ve tried the drinks that pour forth from this delicious machine and I can report that they are as good as human-made libations. Now if they can only replace bar patrons with faceless robots who won’t bother you with long stories about conspiracy theories, I might just be set.
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