ConverseNow, which makes an AI ordering assistant for restaurants, announced today that it has rasied a $15 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Craft Ventures with participation from existing investors including LiveOak Venture Partners, Tensility Venture Partners, Knoll Ventures, Bala Investments, 2048 Ventures and Bridge Investments. This brings the total amount of funding raised by ConverseNow to $18.3 million.
ConverseNow’s lead product is its voice-based assistants dubbed George and Becky. These automated assistants can understand and take orders from customers who simply say what they want as they pull up to a restaurant’s drive-thru. During a recent video chat, ConverseNow Founder and CEO Vinay Shukla told me that the company’s assistants are currently live at 750 restaurant locations, that they achieve an 85 percent order accuracy rate, and that they increase check size by 25 percent.
But ConverseNow is a much bigger play than simply automating the drive-thru. The company is developing a suite of tools to automate order-taking in many different restaurant scenarios. Shukla said he sees ConverseNow as like a Twilio for restaurants, providing one artificially intelligent glue that can power ordering via drive-thru, mobile app, phone, kiosk, etc.
Shukla told me that while ConverseNow can save on labor costs for a restaurant, it’s also being developed with the restaurant operator in mind. “Nobody is talking about the operator experience,” Shukla said, “[Customers] get frustrated, which is causing a lot of attrition. The experience for the operator at the store is not great.”
We have steadily been seeing more adoption of AI at QSRs over the past couple of years, especially in the drive-thru. A company called 5Thru is connecting license plates with customer profiles to provide order history as well as upsell recommendations (KFC was at one point considering adopting this type of service). Valyant AI is another startup that has implemented voice-based ordering for QSRs. More recently, last month McDonald’s said it was testing AI-based drive-thrus based on Apprente (which McDonald’s acquired in 2019) at 10 Chicago locations.
Shukla said it will use the new funding to further develop and scale up its products.
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