Many restaurants are still relying on delivery applications and mobile ordering options, which became common during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Calabasas-based Curbit is giving kitchens tools to optimize these business models and recently brought on Fran Dougherty, a former executive leader at Microsoft Corp. as its chief executive.
The company is using artificial intelligence to help restaurants manage online ordering and reduce customer wait times. Dougherty said that food delivery apps and mobile ordering for takeout became increasingly popular among customers during the pandemic and have not lost their popularity. He said that, considering ongoing staff shortages in the restaurant sector, kitchens have constraints around how many orders they can take and produce at any time and need to how to predict the wait time for an order and communicate that to customers.
Curbit’s platform is currently being used in more than 100 kitchens, including at restaurant chains such as Pasadena-based Dave’s Hot Chicken, Cava, Smashburger and Culver City-based Tender Greens.
Curbit uses AI and machine learning to create a historic model of what typical customer demand and number of orders are for a given day of the week and combines this with information from the kitchen’s operational system about how long individual orders take to cook.
“We’re able to look at how much is going through the kitchen, and how fast, and how many orders are queued up, and then we can modify those promised times and set expectations so that the guest doesn’t arrive too early or arrive too late,” Dougherty said.
Dougherty spent more than 20 years working at Microsoft, notably as a leader for the development team of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing program. He left Microsoft at the beginning of the year and worked for a few months with Curbit, which is built on Azure, to provide guidance on business scaling, then stepped in as its chief executive in September. As Curbit’s AI and machine learning systems have gotten more mature, he said that its models have become more accurate.
Curbit is targeting profitability by the end of 2024. It’s currently closing a seed funding round and is planning a series A round for next year.