The co-founders of xtraCHEF, the invoice and back-office platform that Toast acquired, are back with a new venture targeting the fragmented operational layer that still costs restaurant operators hours of manual work each week. Tandem, operating under AI Labz Inc., launched out of Philadelphia with an initial seed financing round, a pilot program spanning 100 restaurant locations, and a founding-partner roster that includes James Beard–recognized chef and Schulson Collective founder Michael Schulson.
The Platform Thesis
Tandem's core argument is that the last decade of restaurant software solved a digitization problem — getting data into systems — but left operators to manually bridge those systems themselves. A typical multi-unit operator today runs separate platforms for point-of-sale, labor management, accounting, inventory, purchasing, reservations, delivery aggregators, and marketing. Tandem is not building another dashboard on top of that stack. Instead, the company is developing AI agents that connect to existing systems via API integration and act across them: surfacing anomalies, automating repetitive administrative workflows, and executing tasks without requiring a manager to toggle between logins.
The company also frames Tandem as a "multiplayer workspace" — a shared environment where human employees and AI agents collaborate on the same operational tasks, rather than a tool that siloes AI activity away from the team.
"Restaurants don't need another system to log into or another dashboard to manage," said Andrew Schwartz, Co-Founder and CEO of Tandem. "We believe AI gives us the opportunity to build technology that actually works alongside the operator — understanding what's happening across the business, handling repetitive work and helping teams take action."
Operator DNA Built In
Bhavik Patel, Co-Founder and CPO/CTO, previously held the same CTO role at xtraCHEF and is directing Tandem's AI and engineering strategy. The pair's history building software used by thousands of restaurants gives Tandem a credibility advantage that pure-AI startups without hospitality roots often lack — a gap the broader restaurant-ai sector is still working to close.
Schulson's involvement as Founding Partner sharpens that operator perspective further. His role is explicitly tied to product strategy and real-world deployment context, not advisory optics. "What excited me about Tandem is the opportunity to build this from the operator's perspective," Schulson said. "We're identifying the work that takes time away from our teams and asking a simple question: why can't technology do more of this work for us?"
Tandem's target workflow categories span finance and accounting, labor, purchasing, inventory, marketing, guest engagement, and day-to-day operational management — essentially the full back-office surface area that multi-unit restaurant groups struggle to manage efficiently at scale.
Market Timing and What's Next
The launch lands as the restaurant industry's AI investment cycle is accelerating. Vendors from back-office and labor-management software to POS providers are embedding AI features, but purpose-built AI-agent platforms designed to orchestrate across the full tech stack remain relatively uncommon. Tandem's cross-system integration strategy positions it closer to an operating layer than a point solution — a more defensible category if integrations deepen and agent reliability holds up in production environments.
Seed capital will fund engineering and product team expansion, deeper integrations across the restaurant technology ecosystem, and broader rollout beyond the current pilot cohort. A growing waitlist of restaurant groups signals early operator demand, though the company has not disclosed the seed round size or named investors. The 100-location pilot footprint gives Tandem real throughput data to refine agent performance before a wider commercial push.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
