The facility management platform keeping the lights, the AC and the fryers running across nearly 2,000 restaurant and retail locations.
Somewhere tonight, a restaurant manager is holding a phone to one ear and a flashlight in the other hand. The walk-in cooler is warming up, dinner rush inventory is at stake, and the HVAC vendor is not answering. This is the least glamorous emergency in American business, and it repeats itself thousands of times a night. Prefix built a company around the quiet promise that someone should always answer.
Prefix is a facility management platform for multi-site restaurant and retail brands. It doesn't sell a wrench. It sells the thing that happens after something breaks: the request, the right local technician, the schedule, the completed job, the invoice - handled end to end, without a frantic phone tree. The company describes itself as a critical layer that optimizes operations both in the stores and in the back-office, and its whole goal is a single, unglamorous word: uptime.
The market it walked into is enormous and almost invisible. Multi-location brands collectively spend on the order of $500 billion a year keeping their physical spaces running, and by Prefix's framing they lose more than 10% of profit margin to inefficiency and outdated coordination. Nobody puts that number on a pitch deck. Prefix decided it was the whole pitch.
Matches brands to vetted local technicians and automates the routine follow-ups, reminders and data entry that usually eat a coordinator's day.
Round-the-clock coverage for HVAC, refrigeration, plumbing, electric and the other trades that simply cannot wait until morning.
Scheduled upkeep, warranty tracking and asset lifecycle management - the boring work that stops the 11pm emergency from happening at all.
Every job travels from request to scheduling to completion to invoice in one place, with real-time visibility the whole way.
A digital asset database and real-time reporting so operators can see spend, performance and where the next problem is likely to surface.
We set out to alleviate the most significant headaches in multi-site facility management by improving the flow of data, communication, and service.
Seed round to build out AI infrastructure, grow sales & marketing, and scale toward 10,000+ US locations.
They didn't switch to Prefix for the software alone. They switched because, at 2am, someone finally answered - and the cooler got fixed before the morning inventory spoiled. Trust in this category is earned one uneventful night at a time.
What makes Prefix so compelling is that it solves the coordination problem at scale - acting as the connective tissue between large brands and the best local technicians.
Jared Schwartzentruber starts Prefix to attack multi-site facility chaos.
Reaches ~$2.5M ARR and 500% year-over-year growth serving ~50 brands.
Co-led by Collide Capital and Slow Ventures to scale the AI platform.
Capital aimed at AI infrastructure and nationwide expansion.
Same restaurant, same warming cooler, same Friday rush. The difference is the phone. One request goes into Prefix, a vetted local technician is already routed, the job is scheduled and tracked, and the manager goes back to running the floor. The emergency didn't disappear - it just stopped being an emergency.
That is the whole game in a $500 billion industry that runs on things quietly breaking. Prefix isn't trying to make maintenance exciting. It's trying to make it something operators never have to think about - across two thousand locations today, and, if the seed round does its job, ten thousand more.