Tuesday 16 May 2023, London – Tenzo, the AI-powered restaurant PerformanceOps platform delivering a more successful and sustainable industry, today announces a $5M Series A funding round led by Amadeus Capital Partners and S28 Capital.
Founded by two Cambridge computer scientists, one turned restaurateur, Tenzo is on a mission to use AI to help restaurants focus on improving their performance in order to optimise efficiency and increase revenue, while lessening the impact the restaurant industry has on the environment through food waste, which is estimated to contribute to 530M tonnes of CO2 emissions and more than $100B in lost revenue, globally.
Now used by more than 1,500 restaurants worldwide, such as Nando’s, TGI Fridays, and Vapiano brands, Tenzo ingests massive amounts of data in real time using a proprietary Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) engine, then leverages deep learning to make intelligent operational recommendations. Tenzo’s team of world-class engineers and data scientists are now building off the huge advances in large language models (LLMs) to make interactions easier than ever before and ensure that insights will be communicated to restaurants in the right way.
“Digitisation, especially action from data-driven insight, has been slow to penetrate the food and beverage industry,” comments Manjari Chandran-Ramesh, Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners.
“While the pandemic has accelerated this adoption, most Restaurant PerformanceOps rely on experience instead of augmenting that with forecasting using learning models and relevant data. Consequently, the restaurant industry is one of the biggest contributors to food waste. Tenzo’s innovative solution leverages the power of AI using the most appropriate data sources and pertinent models. The PerformanceOps product enables restaurants of all sizes to optimise their operations and reduce food waste, making them more sustainable and profitable.”
This Series A funding round comes after tripling the number of customer locations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitality C-suite executives saw the integration of digital platforms as their main challenge during COVID; this increased volatility put more focus on planning. This funding will help Tenzo on its roadmap to deliver on ambitious growth goals, following on from its partnership with Innovate UK – centred around developing the most accurate sales forecasting platform for restaurants using AI and machine learning – aiming to save the industry around 75,000 tons of food waste globally by 2027.
“We’re taking Tenzo really seriously – we love the new category and the rebrand has made Tenzo even more user-friendly. We’re actively getting the team to use Tenzo to make data-driven decisions that improve performance,” added Ben Cuthbert, L&B Restaurant Group.
About Tenzo
Tenzo is the powerful Restaurant PerformanceOps platform in the palm of your hands. Tenzo brings together data from your tech stack in real-time, from POS to inventory management, from review platforms to labour schedulers. Allowing restaurant operators, from Head Office to General Managers, to supercharge their restaurant’s performance. Enabling better collaboration between team members, predicting sales, improving performance, hitting KPIs as well as accurately knowing what that means for labour and inventory. Remove the guesswork and never be understaffed or overstaffed again and say goodbye to food wastage. Empowering you to act and improve performance. All the time. Helping your restaurant thrive.
About Amadeus Capital Partners
Amadeus has been a trailblazer for three decades, investing in people who create transformational technologies and sustainable businesses. Amadeus backs early-stage and growth companies in Europe and Latin America, from its locations in Cambridge, London and Oxford, San Francisco and São Paulo.
About S28 Capital
S28 Capital is a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley taking a unique approach to investing by supporting startups that are disrupting industries at times of key inflection. The fund combines proprietary data with its global industry network to help portfolio companies establish market leadership.
