We spent 15 years in restaurants before we wrote a line of code

All three of us worked in restaurants -- from bussing tables to managing shifts at Michelin-level kitchens. We spent years watching the same problem repeat itself: customers wait too long to order, servers are stretched thin, and the data that could make a restaurant smarter never gets captured.

Eating out still relies on staff to take every order. It is slow, error-prone, and costs restaurants hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in labor and lost throughput. We knew voice AI had finally become reliable enough to handle real-world ordering -- natural speech, noisy rooms, menu modifiers, allergy flags, the whole complexity of an actual meal.

So we built Orderly: a system where customers scan a QR code at the table and speak to an AI to order, customize items, and pay -- without waiting for staff. Restaurants get higher order values, lower labor costs, and structured data on every customer preference.

We started by walking into restaurants with a laptop and running live demos on the spot. Most early customers converted the same day after watching Orderly handle real orders with real customers. Within three weeks, we had seven paying restaurants on three continents and $170K in contracted ARR.

Restaurants are our wedge into a broader category of voice-driven commerce. We have already expanded into a salon in Dubai, where voice ordering keeps staff focused on their craft while increasing customer throughput. We expect the same infrastructure to power ordering and scheduling anywhere customers interact with physical businesses.