MenuData helps the world's biggest food and beverage brands answer one question fast: what's actually happening on menus right now?
We invested in MenuData's SAFE round as part of a $3M–$5M round led by Lookout Ventures, alongside returning investors Growth Warrior Capital and Gellert Global Group.
Founders Susheel "Sunny" Khamkar and Lino Fabiani built MenuData on the back of an earlier company, Zaru, a restaurant invoice-processing business the pair scaled to more than 1,500 clients. When they wound Zaru down, they kept seven years of restaurant transaction data and built a new product on top of it.
That product, Saffron AI, is a natural-language agent that answers questions about food trends, competitors, and demand — why one flavor is outperforming another in a region, or what's about to break out on social media. It draws on more than 100 million menu items tracked across 300,000-plus restaurants, historical transaction data, growing point-of-sale and distributor purchase data, and social listening across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit. MenuData holds a patent on the technology that normalizes this data across sources, recognizing that terms like "rocket" and "arugula" refer to the same ingredient.
MenuData counts major names across the food and beverage supply chain among its customers, including Dole, Tim Hortons, Olipop, Coca-Cola, and Chefs' Warehouse.
Sunny and Lino have done this before. Having already scaled a prior foodservice company to meaningful revenue and a loyal customer base, they're now applying that experience — plus seven years of proprietary transaction data — to a larger opportunity. MenuData's distribution partnership with the Specialty Food Association, a trade group representing thousands of food and beverage businesses, gives the company an efficient path to reach new customers at scale.
We believe MenuData is well positioned to become a standard data layer for an industry that has historically relied on slower, backward-looking research.