b;eat: a robot barista café that settled into offices and rest stops

Robot-arm coffee for about 2,000 won

b;eat is a robot café that Dalkomm Coffee, a subsidiary of Danal, first showed on 30 January 2018 at Sebitseom on the Han River. An articulated robot arm places a cup under the coffee machine and presses its buttons. The robot was introduced as using technology from Japan’s Denso group, and the coffee machine technology from Switzerland’s Thermoplan. Customers order on an app or kiosk, then enter a four-digit PIN received after payment to collect the drink. Coffee cost 2,000 to 2,800 won, and companies leased a booth for 48 months with a 30 million won deposit and 1.9 million won a month. On the choice of form, the company said it picked a robot over a vending machine to put human convenience first.

100 sites in three years, mostly offices

Installations grew first in office cafeterias. As of July 2018 there were 16 sites, although Sanup Ilbo counted 14 units (sources differ). By September 2019 there were about 50 sites in the Seoul area, and about 30 of them were corporate cafeterias. Monthly orders passed 100,000 cups for the first time in August of that year. The 100th site opened in February 2021, and cumulative installations passed 160 in December. After spinning off as Bit Corporation in October 2020, the company raised 10 billion won in a Series A and launched the third-generation b;eat3X in March 2021. In April it opened the first b;eatbox, a retail-style store, in Pangyo. In October 2022 the company said it planned to reach 200 sites within the year and 400 to 500 in 2023. We could not confirm from public material whether it hit those numbers. Total sales for 2022 rose about 50% year on year, and shop-in-shop units inside other stores rose about 104%. In December 2025 it opened a pilot store at the Busan Cultural Center combined with the AI convenience store PnGo. In January 2026 Bit Corporation said it would extend that format nationwide and shift from a robot coffee business to an AI robot platform company.

A face on b;eat2E, 8,000 cups a month

Money Today reported in May 2021 that the first-generation b;eat sold about 3,000 cups a month, while b;eat2E, which has a face, reached 8,000, a 2.5-fold rise in orders. In October 2022 the company said the robot expresses emotion through 26 expressions and movements such as smiling eyes, tears and heart-shaped eyes, and it planned to extend this to about 160. The company said that winning regular customers takes experiences beyond speed and convenience. Yang Seung-hyun, head of sales and marketing, said users who once found a robot barista strange now order naturally. The company claimed fixed and operating costs run about 40% below a regular café. A Bizhankook reporter who ordered an iced latte paid 2,500 won and noted that cleaning and refilling beans and milk still had to be done by people. Hankyung reported in 2026 that social media reviews of the robot service and drinks were positive. We found no design award or professional design review.

From unstaffed booth to hybrid store

b;eat has moved from a robot-arm booth to stores combined with retail and convenience formats. At the Yatap Station store in 2026, staff work from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. and the store is fully unstaffed only afterward. Hankyung reported that the unstaffed hours were set for the times of greatest security and management burden, which lowers labor costs. In the 2018 hands-on report, cleaning and refilling were already left to people. Even under the name unmanned, human work did not disappear, and the operating model changed to divide that work by time of day. The company explained that the expressions added to a booth that once only brewed drinks were meant to build regular customers.

At what hours does an unstaffed store most need people, and was that work built into the design?

What we haven’t confirmed

• Whether the 2022 plans for 200 sites that year and 400 to 500 in 2023 were met (current store count and closures)
• Cumulative cups sold after the figure of nearly one million in September 2019
• Sales and growth of the PnGo combined stores in 2025–2026
• No designer interview, design award or professional design review was found (the only design intent found is two company statements)