From a Berkeley Dorm Room to Pangasinan Cafes

Orderly started in October 2025 as an idea sketched on a whiteboard in a Berkeley dorm room. Math had been working on conversational AI at BAIR, Ananya was consulting for restaurant chains at BCG, and Bodhi was building consumer products. We kept circling the same observation: restaurant ordering hadn't changed in decades.

The first prototype was embarrassingly simple. A single-page app with a hardcoded menu and a text input connected to GPT. You'd type "two coffees and a croissant" and it would add them to a cart. It worked just well enough to show the idea had legs.

Our first real test came in November when Math flew to the Philippines to pitch R Brewery, a cafe in Pangasinan. The owner was skeptical but willing to try. We set up three tables with QR codes and watched real customers use it for the first time.

The feedback was immediate and visceral. Customers loved the voice feature -- many of them spoke to their phones in a mix of Tagalog and English, and the AI handled it. Staff loved that orders appeared automatically on their screen instead of being shouted across the counter.

Within two weeks, we had three more partners in the Philippines. By December, we were handling real revenue-generating orders daily. The jump from demo to production forced us to solve real problems: unreliable internet, menu changes, order accuracy, kitchen workflows.

Today, Orderly serves restaurants across three countries. We're still a small team, still moving fast, and still grounded in the same thesis: ordering food should be as easy as talking to someone. Because that's exactly what it is.