Inspired by the industry they grew up around, two brothers from Oak Ridge, North Carolina are centering their Raleigh-grown startup on automated technologies designed to improve restaurant operations.
The first product out of ChampOS is Relay, which will convert server–guest conversations into structured tickets sent to the restaurants’ ordering systems in real time. Co-founders Braden and Trevor Champion say the product can eliminate manual order entry and modernize the most inefficient layer in restaurant workflows.
The Champions’ father owns a restaurant in Oak Ridge, a venture they say taught them the day–to-day nuts and bolts of the restaurant industry. From being busboys as teenagers to eventually becoming bartenders, the brothers say they have first-hand experiences with the pain point they’re trying to ameliorate.
“We know this industry like the back of our hands,” Braden said. “We decided to do some customer discovery, talk to lots of restaurants in the area, and that’s how we landed on the idea of our product Relay.”
Applying educational experience on top of their industry background—Braden has a degree in business administration and Trevor in mechanical engineering—the two joined forces to combat a problem they experienced growing up and which they still seen in restaurants today: every order taken twice.
As is noted in a blurb on the ChampOS website explaining the Relay product, the Champions noticed that whenever servers would take orders in the traditional way (using pen and paper or straight memory) at the table, they would have to put in and restructure the exact same order at a POS (point-of-sale) terminal across the room.
“Hours of walking, orders lost in translation, guests waiting on a screen instead of being served,” the website described.
Relay serves up a solution
In most POS systems used by restaurants, each menu item has specified buttons that often need to be used to make note of things like customer allergies or order substitutions. If a server were holding a handheld POS system and taking an order, it would be harder to edit the order if a customer changed their mind or wanted to add something to their food. For traditional servers who use pen and paper, they can get the entire order with any extra information noted, but will still have to take time to input the information into the POS system to be sent to the kitchen.
With Relay, the Champion brothers say they can save the servers, customers and the restaurant itself minutes—if not hours in the long term—of time that could be better spent in other areas.
The technology requires the server to wear a small microphone, which is activated when the server is ready to send an order through. In the product’s first iteration, the server will have to repeat their table’s orders in order to have that structured ticket sent correctly to the kitchen.
“The idea is to still keep a human in the loop,” Trevor said. “People still want to have some kind of confidence coming from the human themselves.”
Using this voice-centered technology would reduce the amount of hardware and UI that a server would have to learn and navigate while in the middle of taking orders and doing their jobs. Eventually, a restaurant using Relay can save money by eliminating the need to use current standard POS hardware. (According to the Toast Tab website, handheld devices go for around $600.)
The brothers’ vision with Relay is ultimately to build a fully AI-voice native POS and operation systems for restaurants, utilizing AI as its backbone and infrastructure to make systems flow quicker and more smoothly. The product is still technically in development mode as the brothers plan to add more attributes to what the AI can do, like scheduling and payroll.
Building Relay so far
The Champion brothers recently launched the first iteration of Relay at their family’s restaurant. They plan to soon offer the product to other restaurants, including 22 interested locations—10 of which have signed LOIs and five of which have issued verbal commitments—through an eventual credit-based model, which is based strictly off usage (how many orders the restaurant takes).
While the brothers are interested in fundraising their pre-seed round through accelerators, they are also open to conversations with investors and industry leaders who may want to connect. Because the team currently consists of just the two of them, they are also looking for connections to “new people who can have the experience to shape the vision of pushing technology inside of the restaurant industry.”
QUICK BITS
Startup: ChampOS
Co-Founders: Braden Champion, Trevor Champion
Founded: 2026
Team size: 2
Location: Raleigh
Website: champos.ai
Funding: Bootstrapped
With both Champion brothers having graduated from NC State, their startup ChampOS is currently going through the 2026 Andrews Launch Accelerator. They will pitch and demonstrate the Relay product, at the accelerator’s Demo Day in August.
The long-term vision for their startup is to build different products to add on top of Relay that will help modernize the restaurant industry and make it easier for the customers to connect more on the conversations and connections, rather than the technologies that get in the way of it.
“With Relay, eye contact never breaks; service feels like hospitality, not data entry,” the website states.