Li-ran Navon

Li-ran Navon spends his days on a problem that most people only notice when their favorite corner restaurant quietly disappears. When an order comes in through a big delivery app, the restaurant gets the food out the door - and loses almost everything else. The customer's name, their phone number, their ordering habits, and a fifth to a third of the check all flow to a marketplace the operator does not control. Navon built Sauce, the company he founded in 2019 and still runs as CEO, to reverse that flow.

Sauce is a white-label ordering, delivery, and retention platform. In plain terms, it gives an independent restaurant its own branded ordering system, its own delivery logistics, and its own customer data, without the steep commissions charged by third-party apps. Restaurants take orders directly through their website and social channels, Sauce optimizes which courier fulfills each delivery, and the guest relationship stays with the operator. "Independent restaurants deserve better tools to operate efficiently," Navon says. It is the sentence that most cleanly summarizes the company.

The scale of the opportunity is what keeps him going. "Globally, 70% of restaurants are single-unit operations," Navon points out - one owner, one kitchen, no in-house tech team, and no leverage against platforms that treat them as interchangeable inventory. Those are exactly the businesses Sauce is built for. In 2024 the company says its restaurants collectively avoided more than $20 million in third-party fees, expanded into New York and South Florida, and began rolling out an AI-powered retention engine that early adopters credit with a 20 to 30 percent lift in repeat orders.

That line captures the temperament behind the company. Navon does not talk like a founder chasing a quick exit. He talks like someone who has been at this long enough to know the compounding only shows up late. Sauce has grown from nothing to eight figures in annual revenue, but he frames the milestone as a midpoint, not a finish line. The goal he keeps returning to is a bigger one: making Sauce the operating system for delivery-driven restaurants, the layer that owns the entire guest journey from the first order to the hundredth.

He arrived here by way of a pivot. Before Sauce, Navon built Say2eat, one of the first voice-ordering systems, developed through Coca-Cola's incubator program. Say2eat was aimed at large chains and proved that sophisticated ordering technology could work at scale. But building for the giants showed Navon where the real gap was. The smaller operators - the ones without engineering teams or negotiating power - were the ones getting squeezed hardest by the shift to digital ordering. Sauce started life as that same voice-ordering technology and then turned to face the independents, letting them sell directly through their own channels commission-free. The company even carried the Say2eat name for a stretch before becoming Sauce.

Navon's read on the market is grounded, in part, because he has done the unglamorous work himself. Before restaurant tech, he worked in restaurants and in delivery, including a stint in flower delivery - the kind of ground-level logistics experience that is hard to fake and easy to spot in the way he describes routing, dispatch, and the small operational frictions that add up. "I've always been an entrepreneur at heart," he says, and his mission is consistent across every venture: give small businesses the same advantages as the big players.

The way Navon runs Sauce mirrors the way he wants restaurants to run: lean, direct, and built to move. The company is remote-first, with a team of more than fifty contractors spread across the United States, South America, Europe, and Asia. It juggles almost a dozen currencies and supports partners in multiple local languages. Rather than treating that distribution as a liability, Navon leans into it. Contractors let Sauce probe a new market without committing to legal entities and overhead in every country. And despite the time zones and the currencies, he insists the operation holds together as a single unit. "We all feel like one company," he says.

The newest chapter is retention. Winning an order once is table stakes; the harder, more valuable problem is bringing the guest back. In 2025 Sauce added a customer retention module to its platform, an AI-driven engine that helps restaurants re-engage past customers and turn one-time orders into habits. For operators who spent years watching marketplaces harvest their most loyal customers, the pitch is pointed: keep the relationship, keep the data, keep the repeat business. Early results - that 20 to 30 percent bump in repeat orders - are the proof points Navon uses to argue that owning the guest is not a slogan but a measurable advantage.

What comes through in his interviews is a founder who is patient without being passive. He is building infrastructure for a fragmented, low-margin, fiercely local industry, and he seems to genuinely like the people he is building for. The measure of success he cares about is not just Sauce's revenue line but whether the single-unit restaurant down the street is still open, still growing, and still in charge of its own customers a decade from now. By his own math, that story is only halfway told.