This machine is replacing baristas

Manav: This is Aviv and Sanat, the founders of Brew Bros — it's a coffee robot, and they're disrupting the coffee industry with machines that can replace baristas. The crazy part is, despite all their achievements, their age has often led to closed doors, since a lot of people are surprised to learn the founders are just 19 years old. In this video, we'll break down the business model behind Brew Bros, and one really cool part of the story is how Aviv and Sanat went from sourcing their own beans from Costa Rica to setting up multiple locations across California.

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Founders: This one here is going to be our iced drink being made — the only difference is we use a clear cup for our iced drinks, then add the ice. Otherwise it's the same coffee machine, the same milk machine, and the same syrup machines. But everything is coded into the software of the robot, and all the machines receive the same kind of input — because different drinks need different amounts of milk, syrup, or milk foam, so whenever an order comes in, it basically tells the robot exactly what was ordered, and gives it instructions like "go to this machine, dispense hot milk for this many seconds."

Manav: How do you two know each other?

Founders: We met back in high school, actually playing tennis freshman year — we always pushed each other, kept competing. Ironically, looking at us today, we've finally ended up as business partners, finally on the same team.

Manav: Most people end up choosing something too niche, too small, not really scalable — what made you pick this idea, what was the origin story?

Founders: I think the main reason we landed on something so different, that a lot of people don't even initially recognize, is that we were really dialed in — even subconsciously, for a long time, we were looking for something that could make a big impact, and something we could manage relatively hands-off, since we're both still in university, so a full-time job, let alone running a business full-time, is genuinely hard.

What actually happened was, about two years ago, I was at San Francisco Airport and saw Café X, a coffee robot there. I was already in that mindset of "we need to find something we really want to build," and it just clicked. That really led us into studying robotics and the whole market — we started learning how cars have been built by robots for decades now, and it's really just a matter of time before that spreads into other industries. If you go to a country like Japan, you'll find ramen robots, ice cream robots, everything. He literally just texted me a picture of the robot at San Francisco Airport, and we said, let's run with this.

It works like any ordinary ordering kiosk — you see different categories of drinks, our top picks, hot chocolate, classics. Say someone orders a cappuccino — you'd go into "Classics," choose between cappuccino, Americano, and latte, click it, check out, it goes to payment, and gives you a receipt. When your drink is ready, it prompts you to scan the receipt, the table brings the drink down, and you grab it.

Manav: Walk me from the idea to where you are today — what were the big challenges, and how did you figure all this out? It sounds like a ton of work.

Founders: When we saw the robot at the Café X location in San Francisco, we researched the different coffee robot manufacturers and operators, and realized that a lot of them are teams of engineers who really know what they're doing on the hardware side — but when it came to actually applying that product well within the US coffee market, they weren't really nailing it. That's why, with Brew Bros, we knew the robot itself is cool to watch make your coffee, but at the end of the day, if the coffee doesn't taste good, it's not going to be a good product. So our focus is heavily centered on the coffee itself — we actually went to Costa Rica before doing any of the robotics work, hand-picked coffee beans, and created our own custom blend. By focusing on the coffee first, we hoped to combine robotics and coffee in a way that actually moves the product forward.

Like he was saying, it was a long process before we even got into the robotics side of the coffee business — about six months, honestly, just learning about coffee itself first. I'd say the biggest challenge was, first, perfecting the coffee, and second, figuring out where to source the right beans, and how to source them properly.

Our drinks take about one to two minutes on average, depending on exactly what you order. We have a couple different machines here — two-cup machines for hot and iced drinks, syrup dispensers that can handle different liquids, so we'll eventually use these for things like matcha and cold brew. Right now, the robot arm is dispensing the coffee and cappuccino milk — the double espresso shot has already gone in, and it's currently adding hot milk, then milk foam.

Throughout this whole process, there's a screen for customers to track their order number and what they ordered. On the left is a section for drinks coming up next, and below that, a pre-order pickup section, which you can access through our coffee robot app. Once your drink is ready, your order number appears in a pickup window, which turns green on screen, and you'll have a QR code on your receipt you scan right here — the drink comes down, and you're ready to go.

Manav: Technically, a lot of people will argue this is replacing baristas and taking away honest jobs — but it's also creating jobs. Can you talk about that?

Founders: On the "replacing baristas" question — while the robot does effectively take over the physical role of a barista, using a robot arm instead of a human one, there's still a huge amount happening behind the scenes. There's a team of engineers on call 24/7 ready to handle any issues that come up, the team it took to actually build the robot, the teams involved in getting it deployed and continuously improving it. At the end of the day, this replaces one barista role, but the number of jobs it creates in the process is significantly larger, especially given the overall growth outlook for the coffee industry — there's still so much more to be built around it.

One really cool thing is we've used AI throughout a lot of this business, all the way down to our logo — we started designing it by hand, and eventually, once we started running out of ideas, we uploaded our hand-drawn sketches into different AI tools and had them iterate through different color schemes and shapes. Eventually we landed on the now-familiar mug-and-bean logo for Brew Bros.

Manav: Let's talk about automation for a second — how automated is this? If I wanted to set one of these up, how many people would it take to run the machine weekly, what's the burn rate, the setup cost — walk me through all of it.

Founders: All you really need is one person and about 20 to 30 minutes of daily maintenance — really simple stuff, refilling the coffee beans, running the automatic cleaning cycles, topping off milk. Setting the whole thing up is also pretty easy, because as distributors, we work directly with the manufacturers and handle that entire process. Any investor or group that wants to open one of these, with their license, we set everything up, train their team, handle inventory — it's basically plug and play, you plug it into the wall and it works.

Manav: What about the other costs — paying technicians, engineers overseas doing the coding, payment processing, things like that?

Founders: Really, the main thing is there isn't much of a fixed cost structure at all — the only real fixed cost is rent. What we've noticed, as we've become a bigger part of this industry, is that when you approach someone with the robotics angle, they're generally pretty open to a revenue-sharing model. Ideally, we're able to eliminate almost all fixed costs — the only real cost you incur is tied directly to selling a coffee: your cost of goods, beans, cups, lids, milk, syrup, plus credit card processing, all of which only gets charged when someone's actually paying for a drink.

One thing I really want to highlight — think about where you can actually place this robot. A company like Artly, for example, mostly does storefronts, malls. Ours can go anywhere — any office space, any retail space. Where we actually operate is mostly hospitals, and right now, we're at a community college — these aren't traditional storefronts, so we don't have to worry about paying a mortgage or commercial rent, which makes it much easier for us to grow as a business, and to help our partners grow too.

Manav: Now let's do a taste test — comparing Brew Bros to Starbucks. We've got an iced latte from Starbucks, an iced latte from Brew Bros, a hot cappuccino from Starbucks, and a hot cappuccino from Brew Bros. I'll give you guys my honest reaction — starting with Starbucks first.

[tasting] Tastes watered down, kind of icy. After a cup like this you'd normally want a sorbet to reset your palate, but we don't have one here, so I'll just go straight into the next one. [tasting Brew Bros] Way better — I think it's the consistency, the foam, the ice isn't as watery as the Starbucks one, and I think the beans themselves are better too.

Now the cappuccinos — Starbucks first. [tasting] I've had this a thousand times, I don't know what's off about it, but it's too watery. Now Brew Bros — [tasting] God, that's so good. Look at the texture difference right here — this is the Starbucks one, look at how different the consistency is.

So guys, what you're getting here is coffee at half the price, with no human interaction required, that tastes twice as good — it's a no-brainer. Go to BrewBros.com, sign up for the waitlist, because they're expanding to locations all over the US, and you'll definitely want to try it.

Manav: Let's quickly talk about pricing — how does it compare to Starbucks? Walk me through the average Starbucks experience — time, cost, mishaps — how is Brew Bros actually better?

Founders: Over the last decade, Starbucks has gotten so popular that every time you walk in, there's a huge line — I'd say at least 10 minutes from ordering to actually getting your drink, and that's the bare minimum. With our robot, you walk up, order, don't need to talk to anyone, customize your coffee exactly how you want it — hotter, iced, sweetness level — and depending on what you order, it's about one to two minutes until your coffee's ready.

One really important piece is the bean itself. A lot of bigger coffee companies eventually reach a scale where they lose real control over their bean supply chain, and what ends up happening is they have to push the roast level to a point where a lot of the flavor, caffeine, and natural oils are basically gone — and those oils are actually the key thing you taste in that first sip. What we do is use a custom blend of Costa Rican beans, roasted to a medium-dark level we found, over years of testing, to be the ideal balance of oil, aroma, and freshness.

Manav: We live in a capitalist economy — this machine is delivering a lot of value to the end consumer by cutting the average price of a cup of coffee roughly in half. Can you talk about how you're able to sell better-quality coffee at half the price?

Founders: At the end of the day, the biggest headache and biggest expense in almost any business is labor, and the value this machine delivers, from both a supplier and consumer perspective, is that it effectively eliminates that labor cost. Because of that, we're able to charge between $3 and $4 for our average coffee. Compare that to Starbucks, which keeps getting more expensive year over year, partly because of how dominant they've become in the market and partly because of rising wage costs they have to absorb. Since that's not a concern for us with the coffee robot, we're able to keep our prices consistently affordable for consumers.

If you're a business owner without a ton of capital and you're looking into starting something like this, it's a genuinely great business — as of 2023, the US has more than 38,000 cafes, and this entire market is going to get completely disrupted by robotics. Coffee, caffeine, is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, not just the US — and over 80% of US adults rely on caffeine functionally just to get through the day.

Manav: God knows I need caffeine to function every day too. A lot of business owners watching this will want to know — you made it sound really easy to set up, and it probably is, but what about licensing, state licenses for serving a beverage? That's a real hurdle, especially in states like California — can you explain that in depth?

Founders: The robot itself is very self-contained — "plug and play" is honestly the best way to describe it, thanks to the automated cleaning cycles and everything else. One of the main hurdles is getting your health permit through the city and county. Once the county actually inspects the robot, they're generally pretty understanding of how it works, but one hurdle we ran into was that a lot of counties simply didn't have existing rules that accounted for automated machines like this — so it was a harder process early on. We're actively working with California's food and drug regulatory branch right now to get our specific robot permitted essentially as a simple vending machine.

If anyone tries to get this kind of permit completely on their own, it's genuinely difficult — which is part of why we license this out, because regulators are already familiar with Brew Bros and the product itself, so it becomes essentially copy-paste, the exact same application process.

Honestly, this isn't a completely hands-off operation — it does require someone to go in daily, restock, run the deep cleaning cycles. But as far as the actual business setup goes, the hard parts, the licensing, all of that, we take care of that for you when you get the license.

Manav: Lastly, where do you want people to find you, and where should people go after watching this video?

Founders: You can find both of us, Sanat Sharma and Aviv Shukla, on LinkedIn, and you can check out our website at BrewBros.com, as well as our robotics site — we also have an investor interest form there if you're interested in learning more about running one of these robots. Fill that out and we'll reach back out to you.

Manav: You guys definitely need to try this out — on this channel we talk about emerging tech, technologies that genuinely change how people live their lives, and coffee is a huge part of that, something we all consume daily. I see potential for this in every hotel lobby, every hospital corner — coffee at half the price that tastes better is going to be great for the end consumer, because you won't have to pay $10 for a latte anymore.