restaurant-ai
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The Phone Wouldn't Stop Ringing. Hostie Turned That Restaurant Headache Into a $16 Million AI Company
A restaurateur and an AI engineer started with one painfully ordinary problem: the phone ringing during dinner service. Their answer now handles millions of guest conversations - but its real test is whether automation can make a restaurant feel more human, not less.
Aakar Khanna
Aakar Khanna is the co-founder and CEO of Marble (formerly Truffle), a Y Combinator S26 startup building an AI-native operating system for the restaurant back-of-house. He grew up inside his family's multi-unit restaurant business, cut his teeth as a Goldman Sachs analyst covering restaurants and food & beverage, then spent years in operations roles at venture-backed startups AtoB and Kouper before building software to tackle the two costs that quietly sink restaurants: inventory and labor.
Expo
Expo is an AI platform for multi-unit restaurant operators that consolidates fragmented data from POS, inventory, labor, and guest-feedback systems into a single intelligent dashboard. Non-technical managers can ask their restaurant data questions in plain English and get answers - no analysts, no SQL, no Tableau build required. Founded by chef-turned-operator Will Pacio and tech veteran Dave Lu (the team formerly behind restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared), Expo connects to systems like Toast, Restaurant365, Crunchtime, Square, and DoorDash to automate reporting and surface operational insights for chains from QSR to fine dining.
Will Pacio
Will Pacio is the co-founder and CEO of Expo, a Dallas-based AI platform that pulls a restaurant's scattered data - POS, inventory, labor, guest feedback - into one dashboard operators can talk to. A Stanford psychology grad who walked away from a planned medical career to cook on the opening team at Thomas Keller's Per Se, he ran IT for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, founded the fast-casual chain Spice Kit, then built the restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared before spinning it into Expo. His pitch: bring the 'Moneyball' approach to multi-unit restaurants so non-technical owners can make decisions with data instead of gut feel.