As takeout and delivery options are becoming ever more popular in the restaurant industry, businesses are faced with phones constantly ringing and not enough manpower to respond to customers efficiently.
Cue Chapel Hill-based Virnika, an AI solution for automatically taking phone orders in restaurants.
Co-Founder and CEO Charles Douthitt said that after a series of interviews with restaurant owners, the biggest pain point was a shortage of labor—either a lack of available workers or labor that is too expensive—often leading owners to fill in shifts themselves.
With Virnika’s AI-powered automatic phone ordering system, a restaurant’s customers can order efficiently, freeing up employees to carry out other tasks and removing the potential problem of orders getting mixed up or misheard—or never taken at all as frustrated callers hang up before an employee can answer the phone.
Says Adil Asif, Virnika’s Co-Founder and CTO, “We want to be at the forefront of bringing that kind of digital automation through voice to business partners, starting with restaurants.”
Over the next two months, the Virnika team will be living in Boulder, Colorado working on their product at Antler, a venture capital firm. When they come back in May, they hope to launch their product.
Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer Cameron Long said Antler will give Virnika the opportunity to appeal to customers outside of their Triangle network.
“If we can do it in another city where no one knows us, we sort of come up with a blueprint for how to do this nationwide,” Long said. “So, I think it’s a microcosm for what we do in the future.”
Already, Virnika has secured two beta customers: Buffalo Brothers, which has several locations across the Triangle and elsewhere in the U.S., as well as Mellow Mushroom’s location in Asheville.
Primordial, a Triangle-based pre-seed fund—and GrepBeat sister company—invested in Virnika in February. (See Primordial’s blog post on the deal here.) Douthitt said this funding is a “launch pad” for the company.
“It’s validation that we’re working on the right things and have traction with other restaurateurs,” Douthitt said. “It gives us more credibility when we talk to our first customers.”
Collectively, the founders have 45 years of restaurant experience. Douthitt, Long and Asif met working for Chapel Hill-based Takeout Central, which they helped scale to $12M in annual revenue. Each of them also have firsthand experience working in food service: a pizza parlor, a family barbecue joint, a Chinese restaurant and a Chipotle, among the three co-founders.
Logan Whitehouse, Virnika’s fourth team member and its director of research and development, said this AI-powered technology will create an “optimal experience” for restaurants’ customers. When patrons call to place an order, they will be speaking with an AI-generated voice. Whitehouse said they are working to find a model that’s as realistic-sounding as possible.
Patrons can ask the AI voice questions about the menu and order just as if they were speaking to a human employee, with the goal of maintaining accuracy of the orders and limiting the amount of information that has to be repeated.
“It’s less of a change in how customers approach it and more of just an optimization of what they would want out of the experience,” said Whitehouse, who is working toward his PhD in AI Applications and Biology at UNC-Chapel Hill.
In this B2B business model, restaurant owners pay a monthly fee for the AI service as well as a certain percentage of each order sold via the technology.
Eventually, Douthitt and his team hope to translate this AI phone technology to other industries in which customers book appointments or reservations over the phone. Long said they also hope to expand within the restaurant industry with more iterations of this technology to help improve efficiency and hospitality.
“We don’t think that phone orders handled by our system is the end of what we’re doing in restaurants,” Long said. “It’s just the beginning.”
