Have you ever counted the number of restaurants on a single block in your city’s downtown area? It’s staggering! SF has about 4 restaurants per 1,000 people. The restaurant and food services industry accounted for 3% of U.S. GDP in 2024. Restaurants are at the heart of our economy and culture.
Over the last 5 years, the restaurant industry has undergone more change than, arguably, any other. Everything changed with Covid. The world shifted online. It was already shifting, but Covid was the accelerant of the century. Today, 77% of offline buying decisions start online.
The shift has devastated local restaurants, while benefiting behemoths.
Take Dominos for example: they have invested billions in software and systems that optimize every part of their business. They have highly specialized functions (1,200 employees at their corporate HQ alone!). They benefit from massive economies of scale (lower cost of ingredients, equipment, etc). They control their customers’ online journey and behavior.
Meanwhile, small brick-and-mortar businesses struggle to stand out and drive consistent sales growth. Even if their food videos go viral on TikTok, they can’t convert that exposure into sales as easily as Domino’s does. On top of this, smaller businesses have a more difficult time adapting to macro challenges, like tariffs or a rising minimum wage environment.
What Shopify did for online commerce, Owner is doing for local commerce, starting with restaurant owners – arming their customers with the tools to fight against their goliaths.
Owner is the full digital stack for restaurants. It combines everything they need to succeed – the website, mobile app, online ordering system, loyalty program, marketing automation engine, and more. All in one place, with one consistent data model. Gone are the days where restaurant owners manage 10+ disparate, generic tools that require technical expertise to optimize. Owner is an opinionated system that works out of the box to automatically deliver profitable sales growth. In the words of Parker Conrad, Owner is a compound startup.
With every technology wave, a new winner emerges. The shift to the cloud paved the way for Toast’s SaaS-based POS ($24b market cap), and the emergence of mobile paved the way for DoorDash’s one-click-delivery ($78b market cap). AI represents the most significant opportunity yet, and Owner is harnessing this amazing new technology to enable small businesses to operate with the superpowers once exclusive to large corporations.
Today, Owner uses AI to optimize SEO best practices, automatically generate high-intent web pages, and increase checkout conversion. In 2025, they will leverage the massive amount of data they have amassed to release AI executives. Think a digital CMO recommending and executing a marketing campaign in advance of Thanksgiving, a CTO suggesting website updates after Google changes an algorithm, or a CFO informing you that a dish is dragging down your bottom line. All this can be automated with AI to help restaurant owners do more with less and grow without adding overhead.
But the best part about Owner is the team and culture. I almost fell out of my chair reading these Glassdoor reviews – 107 reviews, 4.9 total stars, 100% CEO approval rating. The last four reviews are titled: “Owner is the best company I’ve worked for,” “Great place to work!!,” “What an absolute pleasure,” and “A great startup that focuses on its people.”
Adam Guild is one of the most uniquely focused and mission-driven founders I have ever met. He cares more than just about anyone. About his employees, his customers and the world of small business owners. Check out his YouTube channel or the Memo he wrote for the Series C. He flew in one of his customers, Timirie – the owner of Doo-Dah Diner from Wichita, Kansas to SF for the photo above to announce the round, and made sure to position her right in the center. Adam also had the purest motive for starting Owner: help his mom’s struggling dog grooming business.
Thank you to Adam, Dean Bloembergen, Rob Lehman and the entire Owner team for welcoming Meritech on this journey. Congrats on this milestone. We look forward to working with you to help create a lot more successful owners like Timirie!