The co-founders of xtraCHEF, the restaurant invoice-management platform that Toast acquired, are back with a new venture targeting the fragmented back-of-house technology stack that still costs operators hours of manual work every week.
Tandem, operated by AI Labz Inc., has launched out of stealth with a seed financing round and an active pilot running across 100 restaurant locations. Andrew Schwartz, now CEO, and Bhavik Patel, serving as CPO and CTO, co-founded the company with acclaimed Philadelphia chef and restaurateur Michael Schulson of Schulson Collective joining as a Founding Partner.
The Problem They're Solving
Restaurants today typically stitch together a half-dozen or more platforms — point-of-sale, labor scheduling, accounting, inventory, purchasing, reservations, and delivery — yet the connective tissue between those systems is still largely human. Staff manually export reports, reconcile data across dashboards, and flag exceptions by hand. That's the gap Tandem is targeting.
Rather than adding another standalone application, Tandem builds AI agents that layer on top of systems operators already run. Those agents can monitor data flows, identify what needs attention, automate repetitive administrative tasks, and execute actions across the business. The platform is also designed as a collaborative workspace where human employees interact directly with those agents — what Tandem describes as working with "agentic co-workers."
"Restaurants don't need another system to log into or another dashboard to manage," said Schwartz. "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."
Patel, who built the engineering infrastructure at xtraCHEF before and after the Toast acquisition, frames the shift as a move from passive software to active intelligence. "We're moving beyond software that simply stores data or presents information," he said. "AI gives us the ability to build systems that can understand context, reason across multiple sources of information and help execute work."
Operator Voice in the Build
Schulson's role as Founding Partner is deliberately operational rather than ceremonial. The restaurateur brings decades of hands-on experience running multi-concept groups and will work directly with Tandem's product team on what workflows actually slow operators down — a "build with, not for" philosophy the company says sets its approach apart from typical restaurant-tech development cycles.
"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?"
For convenience-store foodservice operators — a segment that shares many of the same back-of-house pain points as full-service restaurants, from inventory shrink to labor scheduling — the Tandem model is worth watching. As c-store foodservice programs grow more sophisticated, the same fragmented-stack problem is emerging in the channel, and AI-agent platforms built for restaurants could find natural adjacency in commissary and kitchen-forward forecourt concepts.
What's Next
Tandem will deploy its seed capital to grow its engineering and product teams, deepen integrations across the restaurant technology ecosystem, and accelerate rollouts with additional restaurant groups. The company reports a growing waitlist beyond its current 100-location pilot base.
The founding team is positioning Tandem as a bet on what Schwartz calls "the next generation" of restaurant technology — one defined less by digitizing workflows and more by intelligence that actively helps operators run the business.
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.
