Squadle, the Cambridge-based restaurant-tech startup, announced on Wednesday that it raised $3 million from Companyon Ventures, Walnut Ventures, in a round led by a private investor.
The round comes after the five-year-old company raised about $1 million in angel investments in 2016.
Most of the funding will go toward building operations, but a “sizable portion” will help launch Squadle Genius, a new artificial intelligence-based video monitoring product, CEO Le Zhang said.
Squadle bills itself as a technology company that replaces restaurants' paper logs and books to automate most tedious tasks. It also makes products that maintain food-storage temperatures and food-safety by linking into wireless sensors and monitors.
The newest addition, Squadle Genius, will use in-store video camera feeds to monitor tables and other areas of restaurants or stores, so employees don't have to.
“It uses video surveillance to spot issues in real time,” said Zhang.
Issues could be empty display cases, open doors, stuffed trash cans or messed up marketing material. He gives an example of a Big Mac burger left on table unattended.
“We can detect that and if it has been sitting around too long,” he said.
If the item appears to be trash or otherwise out of place, an alert will be sent out for an employee to take care of it.
“We see it as freeing up someone from having to walk around and use their eyes to see if tables are dirty,” he said, noting that employees at restaurants often are burdened with many chores that have nothing to do with preparing and serving food.
Squadle is now seeking video hardware partnerships, as the product rolls out in several restaurants.
"I am extremely bullish on that technology," said Tom Lazay, a managing partner of Companyon Ventures, an investor in the newest round.
Lazay met with Squadle about six months ago and was sold on the startup while performing due diligence, when a large franchise owner became a customer, said Lazay. Among Squadle’s partnerships are Dunkin’ Brands and McDonald's franchises.
Lazay said that Squadle's technology would not take away the jobs of employees.
"It gives them analytics and insights they would not otherwise have," he said. "I think it makes the staff more efficient."
