Creator is Making a Comeback, Only This Time as a Platform Player and Not ‘Robot Theater’

Here at The Spoon, we’ve been following pretty much every robot restaurant concept for the past decade, and have watched dozens of company ideas and hundreds of millions of dollars come and go in this space.

One company that has gone and appears to be coming back again is Creator. For those new to the space, Creator was/is a robotic restaurant company founded in 2012 (with development dating back to 2009) in San Francisco. The company, which raised roughly $60 million in its first life, shut down its flagship storefront during the COVID pandemic and has limped along since, periodically opening locations such as one in Daly City. From the outside, it’s looked like the company has essentially been shuttered for the past couple of years.

But not so fast. According to the company’s website and an announcement on LinkedIn, Creator has returned as a startup building a robotic burger platform focused on providing technology to other restaurant brands.

From the company’s website: “Creator as a brand carries on — but the platform is bigger than the brand. The technology has been redesigned to allow any operator to deploy it under their own existing brand, or for new brands to build a sustainable concept around the technology.”

In other words, Creator is abandoning a past of what it describes as “robot theater,” and is instead betting that its technology can slot into existing chains, effectively turning its once highly visible, consumer-facing robot into back-of-house infrastructure.

This pivot comes after the company says it began conversations with other restaurant chains in 2024 and ultimately decided to focus on serving existing restaurant brands rather than building new locations centered on the “robot restaurant” concept.

According to the company, it began bringing on new talent in 2025 and saw long-time employees transition into new leadership roles. The CEO of Creator is now Michael Balsamo, who joined the company as a hardware engineer in 2014 after a stint at Tesla and worked his way up through roles including director of hardware engineering and CTO before assuming the role of chief executive last year. The company’s other full-time employee is Peter Rosenbaum, head of engineering and hardware, who joined Creator in 2019.

The other executives the company is touting appear to be serving in advisory roles, including Atul Sood (former chief business officer of Kitchen United), Eric Hansen (former global head of enterprise sales for Uber Eats and business development for Nuro), Ron Glavan (former SVP of equipment innovation for Wendy’s), and chef JJ Johnson, a well-known author and owner of Fieldtrip.

Notably absent from the company’s current leadership is Alex Vardakostas, the original founder who began working on what would become Creator in 2009. According to Vardakostas’s LinkedIn, he is currently working as a researcher and advising companies, and stopped working on Creator in March 2023.

The company has a booth this week at the Restaurant Leadership Conference in Phoenix, which is essentially a coming-out party for the newly reconstituted Creator. While the company’s website says it has a San Francisco location coming soon, the bigger play appears to be seeing whether it can gain traction as a robotics platform for existing chains.

Given the company’s past physical setups, where the robot was consumer-facing and a burger would take about four minutes to make, it will be interesting to see how the reimagined Creator platform makes the transition to serving existing chains. Typical fast food restaurants operate at extremely fast speeds, with each burger made much more quickly, and high-volume locations producing dozens, if not hundreds, of burgers simultaneously.

Hopefully we’ll find out soon.

You can see the first-generation Creator in action below.