When Christian Wiens helped launch Loman AI in the summer of 2024, restaurants weren’t on his mind. A moving company was.
“We had some friends who owned one and we built a demo for them,” he said.
Wiens also enrolled the company in a Facebook group for small business owners, expecting to hear from others in the lift-with-your-legs crowd. He heard from a different community.
“Within 15 minutes, three restaurant owners reached out and asked if they could use the service to answer phones for them,” he said.
It took Wiens and his team about that long to pivot its business model.
The company has been experiencing Bolt-level growth ever since, including a recent $3.5 million fundraising round.
“Our goal is to work with 2,000 restaurant locations in the next 12 months,” he said.
The voice AI field is crowded, with many competitors jockeying for landscape. But Wiens is confident.
“A big difference with us is we’re able to spin up and get somebody up and running in under 24 hours,” he said. “That’s a big deal.”
The company works with mom and pops as well as enterprise brands, with Wiens keeping a warm spot in his heart for the small scrappers. “They need us more than even the mid-market brands with five to 50 locations,” he said.
Loman AI can handle call volume. A ton of it.
“We can answer up to 50 calls at one time for a restaurant,” he said. “You’ll never miss a call. You’ll never put anybody on hold.”
And the service has a Gandolfini quality in that it can be programmed to slip into character.
“We set up a restaurant in New Jersey with a mobster-sounding guy as its voice,” he said. “It’s super fun.”
If Wiens sounds like someone who can relate to the juggling act required of an operator during peak hours, it’s because he’s been there.
“When I was younger, I worked in a fast-casual barbecue restaurant in a beach town in Southern California,” he said. “We had many days where we would be so busy we would take the phone off the hook. Literally take it off the receiver and put it on the counter. There were three of us working in the front of house and there was no way to get to every call.”
Not with a lobby full of people staring holes at you.
“If you have a customer standing in front of you and a customer on the phone, you’re always going to deal with the one in front of you, even though they’re worth the same amount of money,” he said.
With voice AI, the phone customer doesn’t go to the back of the line.
Loman AI can also book reservations, field guest questions, and sync with POS and reservation systems.
“We’ve been able to increase the average phone order revenue by more than 23 percent for our customers and decrease labor costs by more than 18 percent,” he said.
Just like it happened when the company first appeared on Facebook, the interest is there.
“We’re getting 400 restaurants coming to us every month looking for the service,” he said.
It’s not hard for Wiens to understand.
“With us operators don’t need to have somebody sitting on the phone,” he said. “They can focus on helping staff in the restaurant run food or manage the marketing. We can give a layer of data to operators that is valuable.”
