Starting back in 2016, the owner of eatery El Arroyo and bar Cain and Abel's hoped to find a tech company to build software that could better engage restaurant staffers, drive sales and reduce administrative work.
"I've been into restaurants, and even technology, since I was 6 and kind of knew what a big lift it is to build and take to market a tech company," Ellis Winstanley said. "So, I really just wanted to be a customer. Honestly, I just wanted it for our businesses."
After a long search and a bunch of "no"s, Winstanley decided in 2017 to put together a team and build the tech himself.
The result was Axial Shift. The Austin-based restaurant software startup said Sept. 27 it has secured $4 million in seed funding to help it expand its platform and build out its sales team.
The investment was led by Austin-based venture firm Silverton Partners. Axial's other backers include angel investors, friends and family and Winstanley.
Axial Shift's SaaS platform ties together data from a variety of points in restaurants, including point-of-sale machines and third-party ordering platforms, such as Toast and NCR Aloha. It gives real-time visibility into sales, orders and other operations and is accessible to servers, managers and business owners.
With that, Axial creates gamified experiences for servers that allow them to compete for higher tip rates or earn badges for arriving on time or selling particular menu items. For example, a restaurant could quickly create a contest to see who can sell the most queso and then reward the top-selling staffers. The platform also displays labor actuals versus forecasts, tip percentages in real time and enables tip pooling and online scheduling.
The system also integrates with common apps such as Slack and Airtable.
One of the platform's primary purposes is to make work more fun for restaurant staff, which often have high turnover rates, as well as modernize restaurant software by integrating some of the social media-like features younger generations have grown up with. The other reason is just to make better use of all the data flowing through these businesses.
"A lot of the restaurant world is kind of in a black box of data, all the data is locked down," Winstanley said. "So we're kind of opening that up with the idea of the shared data will drive better performance."
Early customers include Mendocino Farms, Johnny Rockets and several small- and large-scale restaurant groups. Winstanley also uses it at the eight restaurants he owns. Axial has eight Austin-based employees, as well as six in Costa Rica and others working remotely.
Early on, Austin-based HotSchedules was one of the companies that Winstanley reached out to to build such a platform. While that didn't happen, he brought on two of the company's earliest employees, Justin Buckley and Matt Woodings, to help create Axial Shift.
Woodings is the company's chief technology officer, and Buckley recently took over as CEO as Winstanley became executive chairman on the heels of the funding round.
Buckley said Axial has plenty of competition for several of its features, such as Restaurant365's reporting tools, but few rivals that are as focused on employee experience and tying together all available data.
"It's almost like everyone from the CEO to the dishwasher gets the data they need in real time to be able to understand how they're doing and how they can make more money and how they can improve their professional careers, and then they get to have fun with it," he said.
Buckley said the company plans to focus on improving its user experience and user interface designs to make it even easier and more fun for restaurant staffers.
