After placing their order on an app ahead of time, the customer drives to the restaurant, finds a parking spot, and heads inside. They scan the space. Is it crowded with delivery drivers standing by and people ordering at the register? Is their food ready? Will they need to grab it from an employee? Is there a designated pickup shelf? If so, is it packed with bags, leaving them to scan each receipt for their name?
For all the advancements in digital ordering and the growing demand for pickup in recent years, the experience often falls short of seamless. But what if customers could simply pull up, grab their food from the car, and be on their way in a matter of seconds—without the addition of another drive-thru lane for orders placed through the app? That’s the vision behind Pipedream.
Founded in 2021 by Garrett McCurrach, the Austin-based startup has found a new way to get food into the customer’s hand with its Instant Pickup system, which uses underground robots to facilitate high-speed order handoffs.
Pipedream’s broader ambition extends beyond just improving food delivery. The company is working toward connecting entire cities with underground delivery networks. In late 2023, it began testing longer deliveries in Peachtree Corners, Georgia, where it successfully connected an office building to a retail store via a 0.7-mile tunnel.
“I don’t know why, but for my whole life, making it easier to get things has been something that I’ve been obsessed with,” McCurrach says. “How do you make moving something from point A to point B as fast and as cheap and as easy as possible?”
While this larger-scale vision of underground citywide delivery networks will likely take years to come to fruition, Pipedream is currently focused on the fast-food sector with its Instant Pickup system. It is modeled after the infrastructure that delivers utilities like water and electricity to buildings and uses a modular, train-like setup.
The process begins with the input portal, a compact unit that can be installed flexibly within the kitchen, ideally situated near the end of the food prep line where items are being finished. This allows for quick and easy loading of orders into the system. From the input portal, the order is transferred to a temperature-controlled storage station, typically located in close proximity to minimize the distance the order has to travel.
If Pipedream is able to install its location software development kit on the restaurant’s app, the system will automatically move the items from storage to the output portal—a receiving station similar to a bank tube system—when the customer arrives. If not, there’s a verification process that uses tools like voice AI or QR codes for quick confirmation. The output portal adjusts to align with the height of the car’s window. Then, the customer simply grabs their food and is on their way.
The company has designed the system to accommodate different restaurant layouts. If the only available space for the input portal is near the front of the restaurant, while the only location for the outdoor storage station is behind the building, that flexibility is built in.
“We realized that the system had to work everywhere, and that’s why it works just like utilities,” McCurrach says. “It’s really easy to plug it in and move it around wherever it needs to go. You can put that input portal anywhere in the kitchen that you need. And then, similarly, if you want to put 10 portals in the parking lot, you can do that. If you want one portal a quarter of a mile away, you can do that.”
The goal when creating the system was to make pickup as frictionless and easy—perhaps even easier—than the drive-thru. The entire interaction is designed to take just 15 seconds.
“That’s a magical experience, and we have all of the pieces to do it,” McCurrach says. “And not just do it, but make it really easy to retrofit that technology into current existing buildings, to do that really cheaply and really quickly, and to allow flexibility.”
Some quick-serves have inquired about using Pipedream’s system for their drive-thrus, but McCurrach is not entirely sold on this idea. While he isn’t against the concept, he believes there’s a significant opportunity in refining the pickup experience first.
“So many people love pickup, but it is really a bad experience right now,” he says. “If people love it that much with it being a bad experience, how much more will they love it when it’s even better than the drive-thru? I think that’s the opportunity that people are missing.”
One of the key benefits of the Instant Pickup system is its ability to build stronger reliance on a restaurant’s app—a central goal for many brands aiming to drive more business through their first-party ordering channels. By facilitating this shift, the system enables restaurants to directly collect customer data, helping them build stronger, more personalized relationships with their guests. Plus, there’s the benefit for customers, who can earn rewards and may have access to special offers and promotions through the app.
“Outside of everything else that the app is good for, Instant Pickup is kind of like an express lane,” McCurrach says. “It’s kind of like what the Fast Pass is for Disney, but for food. You can just skip the line and go right through. This makes it so much better than a drive-thru. This is a real reason to order ahead. We even have a sign that goes on our portal when it’s facing the drive-thru that says, ‘If you had used the app and ordered ahead, you’d already be on your way.’”
In November, Pipedream completed its first installation at a site in Texas. The store brand will be announced in the future.
Pipedream focused on minimizing the construction timeline, ensuring that the drive-thru could stay open throughout the process, and keeping costs in check. While the first installation took four nights—allowing for extra buffer time to ensure a thorough job—McCurrach is confident about getting down to two or three nights of construction consistently, and at the same time, reducing the cost along with that.
The construction process is simpler, less costly, and quicker than many might expect, and the same goes for the technology itself. While the word “automated” in the QSR industry often brings to mind complex, flashy systems like robotic fry cooks or sandwich makers, McCurrach says to think of Instant Pickup more like a self-checkout kiosk.
“They’re easy to install, there’s not a lot to them, and not a lot can break on them,” he says. “We’ve really worked to take as much complexity and engineering out. The things that can break are swappable. If there is something that breaks, we make sure that we can get that part out there that day, and anyone can go in, open the back, and swap it out. It’s pretty reduced in the amount of actual things happening, which is great for both getting that cost down and for long-term reliability.”
Pipedream’s philosophy is that if people recognize a system as a “robot,” it’s probably not a good one. McCurrach points out that a dishwasher is one of the best examples of automation—people forget it’s automated because it simply works and does what it’s supposed to do.
“We wanted to make sure that we were able to achieve that with this—that it’s so simple, you wouldn’t even call it automation,” he says.
