The co-founders of restaurant back-office platform xtraCHEF have launched Tandem, an AI-native company targeting the operational complexity that plagues multi-unit restaurant groups, and closed an undisclosed seed financing round to accelerate its rollout.
Andrew Schwartz and Bhavik Patel, who built xtraCHEF before its acquisition by Toast, are betting that the current generation of large language models enables a fundamentally different kind of restaurant software — one built around autonomous agents rather than additional dashboards. Schulson Collective founder Michael Schulson joins as Founding Partner, giving the startup direct operator input at the product level.
The Problem Being Solved
Restaurants today run across a patchwork of point-of-sale, labor, accounting, inventory, purchasing, reservations, delivery, and marketing platforms. Despite years of digitisation, operators and their teams still devote significant manual effort to moving data between systems, spotting anomalies, and executing repetitive administrative work. Tandem's thesis is that AI agents can sit across that existing stack — integrating with systems operators already use rather than requiring a rip-and-replace — and handle those workflows autonomously.
The company is positioning itself as a "multiplayer workspace" where human staff and AI agents collaborate in a shared environment, a framing that distinguishes it from single-function automation tools already on the market. Tandem plans to introduce agents around specific high-value workflows first — finance and accounting, labor, purchasing, inventory — and gradually connect those capabilities across the broader organisation.
"Restaurants don't need another system to log into or another dashboard to manage," said Andrew Schwartz, Co-Founder and CEO. "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."
Traction and Team
Tandem is already live across 100 restaurant locations through its pilot programme, with a growing waitlist of additional restaurant groups. Schwartz serves as CEO; Patel takes the combined CPO/CTO role, bringing the engineering and AI architecture experience he developed at xtraCHEF. Schulson, whose Schulson Collective spans multiple full-service concepts in major U.S. markets, will focus on translating operator pain points into product direction.
"There is an enormous opportunity for AI in restaurants, but it has to solve the problems operators actually deal with every day," said Schulson. "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?"
Seed capital will be deployed toward expanding the engineering and product teams, deepening integrations across the restaurant technology ecosystem, and scaling deployments with restaurant groups. No financial terms of the seed round were disclosed.
What It Means for the Sector
The launch arrives as restaurant operators face sustained pressure on labor costs and margins, making administrative efficiency a competitive lever. The xtraCHEF-to-Toast transaction demonstrated acquirer appetite for back-office restaurant tech; a successor venture from the same founding team, now layering in agentic AI, will draw attention from both strategic buyers and venture investors active in foodservice technology.
For trade buyers and integration partners, Tandem's stated commitment to working within existing technology stacks — rather than displacing them — lowers the adoption barrier for multi-unit operators already locked into enterprise POS or ERP agreements. That positioning mirrors the integration-first approach that helped xtraCHEF gain traction before its acquisition, and aligns with broader AI adoption trends emerging across foodservice operations.
Schwartz framed the moment in generational terms: "The last generation of restaurant technology was about digitizing workflows and putting software into every part of the restaurant. We believe the next generation will be about intelligence and action — technology that understands the business and actively helps operators run it."
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.
