Co-founders Andy Schwartz and Bhavik Patel reunited to start Tandem. | Photo courtesy of Tandem
Andrew Schwartz hit a home run with his first restaurant tech startup, a service that helped restaurants digitize their invoices and other processes, eliminating a good deal of paperwork for operators.
After selling xtraCHEF to Toast in 2021, and making a stop at Square along the way, Schwartz and co-founder Bhavik Patel are back with a new startup called Tandem that is aiming to use AI to automate even more of a restaurant’s operations.
Both spent several years at Toast after the sale. Schwartz left in 2024 with plans to take some time off and spend more time with his family. But he did not lose his passion for building technology for independent restaurants, particularly the one- or two-unit operators he’d worked with at Toast.
“Could you give them the same technology that the franchises had, so that they can be on a level playing field?” he said in an interview. “I think that was what got me into this whole space.”
He began developing what he described as “xtraCHEF 2.0,” a simplified version of the original product focused on helping mom and pops automate vendor procurement. It caught the attention of Square, which brought him and his business aboard in an acquihire.
There he would become immersed in artificial intelligence, which would take his restaurant tech journey down a path that would ultimtaely lead to Tandem. Square CEO Jack Dorsey has taken an aggressive approach to AI adoption. “We got hit with AI right away,” Schwartz said.
Employees were equipped with an AI-powered tool called Goose that brought together all of their apps — Slack, email, notes, to-dos — into one dashboard. Then AI-assisted coding started, which turned non-coders like product designers into de facto engineers.
For Schwartz, the “aha moment” on AI came in November 2024, when his colleagues began reporting an exponential leap in the abilities of the frontier AI models. This prompted the company to fundamentally rethink how it operated.
“A business that big, reevaluating its whole existence,” Schwartz recalled, “it sort of knocked me off my chair.”
It also knocked him, and many of his fellow employees, out of a job. This past March, Square’s parent company, Block, laid off 40% of its workforce, saying it planned to run more of its business with AI going forward.
But rather than feel bitter toward AI, Schwartz was inspired by what he’d learned at Square. “I left there knowing that I felt very educated on where the future of AI was going,” he said. That future, he believes, will involve AI taking on more of the job of actually running a restaurant.
After talking to restaurants and observing the restaurant tech landscape, Schwartz concluded that the existing tech on the market was doing a decent job of easing operators’ workload, but there were gaps. Even when systems were integrated, he said, they weren’t flawless.
One operator, a heavy tech user, told him the tech “only gets us 80% of the way there,” he said. “They all do some things well, but it’s not like the whole workflow of our business is extremely automated, and that these systems are working together to help us. And we feel like AI could actually get us to 100% completeness.”
That helped shape Schwartz’s view that AI, and specifically AI agents, could be the missing piece.
Given access to all of a restaurant’s data, AI can be programmed to carry out specific tasks, like building labor schedules, changing menu items based on ingredient fluctuation, or placing orders with vendors when something is running low. Also, forecasts. “AI is really, really good at forecasting,” Schwartz said.
That idea is the basis for Tandem, which has raised a seed round and is currently in a pilot phase with 100 restaurant locations.
The technology builds integrations with an operator’s existing software and feeds the data from those systems into a centralized database. It then trains AI agents to use that data to carry out specific tasks.
For instance, one agent could be trained to keep a restaurant’s cost of goods at 23%. It monitors the data and sends the operator alerts or action items when costs creep up. Another could be asked to generate a daily finance report with revenue and cash flow trends as well as suggestions for how the restaurant can improve its performance.
The agents are designed to be proactive, because restaurants “are not really looking for dashboards anymore, or reports,” Schwartz said. “They want the software to go and execute tasks on their behalf.”
The end product is a “virtual agent” that employees can communicate with.
Exactly where that communication takes place is an open question. The company is envisioning a Slack-like interface in a mobile app and browser, with different channels for different functions. But Schwartz said Tandem might need to be flexible on this point.
“Restaurant people are not corporate America,” he said, noting that restaurant employees are far more likely to communicate via text message or WhatsApp than Slack. “So you have to kind of find out the right fit for them. … Our original thesis is that there is still no standard tool for how restaurant employees communicate with each other.”
Tandem is one of a number of restaurant tech companies rolling out AI agents, including Schwartz’s former employers, Toast and Square. But Schwartz said even restaurants that use those “end-to-end” systems also tend to use other apps on top of them, and Tandem would be able to connect them all.
“I just don’t see either of those companies achieving a true full stack where everything talks to each other the way we can with our layer on top,” he said.
As for pricing, Tandem plans to charge a flat monthly fee — “let’s say it’s $99 a month,” Schwartz said — that covers a certain amount of usage, with additional costs for users that exceed that level.
Currently, the 100 pilot restaurants are using Tandem for free. Schwartz said so far the AI has excelled at forecasting, and that there is a definite opportunity to automate the scheduling and payroll processes. “There’s more manual steps in payroll than I thought for a lot of these restaurants,” Schwartz said.
And he has been impressed by operators’ willingness to innovate. Some have already built their own AI agents in Claude on top of Tandem, and the company is adding some of those into the product.
“I know AI gets sort of a bad rap in the media,” he said, “but it seems like people who are running restaurants are open to using a piece of technology to help their business.”
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