Autonomous restaurant technology company Appetronix has appointed Heather Wilkie as Chief Financial Officer, positioning the Columbus, Ohio-based foodtech firm for a Series A capital raise expected in the coming months.
Wilkie arrives from Compass Group Canada, where she spent seven years advancing from Vice President of Finance into executive leadership in Business Transformation. In that role she oversaw 100-plus project implementations spanning 600-plus kitchens and cultivated partnerships with more than 50 third-party organisations — among them Appetronix itself. Before Compass, Wilkie served as the finance lead of Deloitte's Canadian Consulting practice and sat on its Canadian Consulting Executive Committee.
The Strategic Hire
The appointment comes as Appetronix moves beyond its first commercial deployment — a Donatos Pizza unit launched in June 2025 at Columbus International Airport in partnership with HMSHost — and expands across multiple cuisine platforms. The company holds a portfolio of patents on food-grade robotic systems and describes its core product as a fully autonomous "restaurant-in-a-box" capable of cooking made-to-order meals with zero on-site employees, automating portioning, cooking, plating, and cleaning.
"I have watched Appetronix evolve, and what exists today is a different company," Wilkie said. "The leadership team is strong, the strategy around next-generation QSR is clear, and there is real start-up energy behind it. Combining that momentum with a commercialised product already operating in the field made this an opportunity I was excited to take on."
Series A in Sight
Co-Founder and CEO Nipun Sharma framed the hire explicitly around capital readiness. "Heather has done the thing most finance leaders never get to do, which is run the numbers and then go build the operating machinery behind them," Sharma said. "Her experience allows us to prepare for our Series A in the coming months, which is exactly what this stage of growth requires."
The appointment signals a maturation arc common among foodtech ventures that have cleared proof-of-concept deployments and are now engineering the financial controls institutional investors require before committing growth capital. Autonomous kitchen technology has attracted sustained interest from QSR operators and airport concessionaires alike, with labour cost pressures and throughput efficiency driving experimentation across the quick-service and foodservice segments. Wilkie's operational depth — having scaled finance functions across hundreds of kitchens at one of the world's largest contract foodservice companies — maps directly to the unit-economics rigour that Series A investors in the sector typically scrutinise.
For the broader foodtech and restaurant-automation space, the hire underscores how autonomous cooking platforms are transitioning from demonstration projects to commercially deployable assets requiring institutional-grade financial infrastructure, not just engineering credibility.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
