Kutlerri.ai, a Houston-based artificial intelligence startup offering a lineup of off-premises-focused agents alongside other AI assistants tailored for restaurant management use cases, secured a $4 million funding round aimed at fueling expansion.
The round will finance the rollout of Kutlerri.ai’s catering sales agent and other products. The firm’s agents in beta or development stages include assistants built for third-party sales, online sales, third-party marketing spend optimization, prime cost optimization, and daily prep and waste control.
“Ask an operator which off-premise channel is underperforming and they will name it in a second,” Payal Tripathy, co-founder and chief operating officer of Kutlerri.ai, said in a September 30 press release . “Ask who is working on it and there is usually no answer. We put an agent on that channel and run it ourselves. Our fee comes out of the orders it books or the money it saves. No orders and no savings, no fee.”
The startup’s first agent to hit general availability is selling catering directly to businesses in most major U.S. cities. The AI assistant takes on inbound tasks like sending quotes, closing orders and answering calls, emails, web forms, texts and chats, as well as outbound duties like mapping catering-fit businesses within a 30-mile radius, finding and following up with buyers at each business, and reaching out to accounts with 90 days of inactivity.
Unlike subscription-based catering software such as CaterZen, which operators use to manage their catering channels, Kutlerri.ai runs its AI agents on behalf of the restaurants. The company charges a share of what an agent earns or saves, and no fee if it delivers nothing. An accompanying mobile app is slated to launch before the year’s end for operators who would rather run the agents themselves.
The agent’s stomping grounds are at Rasa, a fast-casual Indian chain with five locations in the Washington, D.C., area. After 10 months of operations for the restaurant group, the agent booked $450,000 in new catering revenue without adding team members.
“We could see the catering demand. We just had no way to go out and win it,” Trey Moats, Rasa’s chief executive, said in a press release. “Working leads and quotes properly is a full-time job, and across five locations nobody had the hours. Kutlerri.ai took the whole channel off our plate, and our operations never felt it.”
Four of Kutlerri.ai’s six agents focus on off-premises channels, which Trisha Narahari said restaurants often lack staff to manage. Narahari is managing director at Narahari Investments, which led the funding round, and a Rasa board member.
“Off-premise gave restaurants a stack of new channels and no new people to run them,” Narahari said. “Every vendor sold a platform and left the work to someone who was never hired. Kutlerri.ai does the work itself, and it proved the model on a real restaurant’s P&L before it sold to anyone else. That is what we invested in.”
