London startup, Tenzo, this week announced a $1.8 million funding round for their AI-powered restaurant analytics platform, according to news from VentureBeat. The round was led by S28 Capital, with participating from Acequia Capital and Force Over Mass.
Tenzo, the brainchild of longtime friends Adam Taylor and Christian Mouysset, is an algorithm-based system that analyzes restaurant data in real time about sales, labor costs, customer feedback, and inventory. The idea is to provide restaurants with as much granular — and actionable — information as possible so the businesses can predict things like how many people to staff or how much food to order on a given week. In turn, managers have a better shot at avoiding things like high labor costs or unused food rotting in the kitchen.
Users access the Tenzo system via an Android or iOS app, or through the company’s web interface. In addition to data coming from sales, employee performance, and inventory, the platform also integrates data from third-party partners like Lightspeed, Google Places, Twitter, Accounts IQ, and others. Restaurants can use Tenzo to see what people are saying on social media, for example, or to know about significant weather changes that could affect customer traffic (e.g., a tornado warning).
As the VentureBeat post notes, a system like Tenzo’s could be especially useful in fighting food waste, an issue that’s only going to become bigger for restaurants (and the planet) in the near future. And Tenzo won’t be the only company fighting that war with AI. Ingest.ai makes a software layer that users machine learning to extract data from a restaurant’s many different channels and display it in a single dashboard. They offer similar data insights on things like labor costs, sales, and, of course, inventory.
Right now, Tenzo is in 700 physical restaurant locations around the U.K., the U.S., Ireland, and France. The company claims that already, customers have been able to reduce staff costs by 10 percent and food waste by 28 percent.
Leave a Reply