Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Today we are revisited by a guest that was on a couple of years ago. The team at Loop AI continues to transform their delivery product to help restaurants continue to make more money, as well as drive top line sales and reduce cost. Their founder shares his vision and really how he started working in the ERP world, understanding accounting. He also runs a restaurant. back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I'd ⁓ to thank everyone for joining us. As I like to say every time that we get on the air, ⁓ guys have got lots of choices, so thanks for hanging out. ⁓ I am joined by a second time guest, and I'm going let him talk a little bit about what has founded. ⁓ Anand, why you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are before we jump into kind of ⁓ loop what loop is for those that missed the first show, and then we can dig into kind of how you got here. so he has seen both sides of it and understands ⁓ a game changer delivery, third delivery can be ⁓ or if you don't manage it, it could really hurt your business. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julian. I'm the chief revenue officer for CBS Northstar. ⁓ We the Northstar up on a cell solution for multi units. Please check us out at cbsnorstar.com. And now onto the episode. all of the cool stuff that's been going on. But give us a little background because I love listening to founder stories ⁓ you and I have gotten to know each other over the last couple of years. It's been fun. introduce yourself to our listeners out there.

Anand Tumuluru: Absolutely, Jeremy. Thanks for having me back. I keep running into you and a bunch of other guests of your podcast on trade ⁓ show floors think back to these conversations fondly. So it's always a pleasure to be here. Thanks for this opportunity. So super quick founding I started my career building out ERP systems for Flipkart back in the day. This was in 2012. Surprisingly, I had a lot of fun doing that, mostly because it was.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: ERP systems and fun don't typically go hand in hand.

Anand Tumuluru: not at all, account receivables, account payables. ⁓ They're some of the most dreaded part of any businesses, any organizations, ⁓ record ⁓ And of the things that struck me there was the way that we actually built our supply chain system was what enabled Flipkart's continued success and growth and the systems that we built there are. are still the blueprint and they continue to operate today. And it was mostly actually the people ⁓ I learned a lot from and that's where ⁓ ⁓ bug ⁓ sort of bit me. fast to 2015, a lot of the early Flipkart folks were leaving and I ended up going on my own startup journey, founding journey, trying build a fintech startup based on some technology that was specific to India that got launched. the hard way that it's never a good idea to work forward from a technology get excited about it and build around it. ⁓ there are things about AI ⁓ I think I learned that be applied to AI that I learned back then, is that you should always work backwards from the customer, right? And understand the problem ⁓ and whatever great technology you have at hand ⁓ has to in that context. after sort of chewing glass, looking into the abyss, you for a, for an year or two, decided to join Uber, which is where I met my co-founder. saw, you know, Uber go public. And then, you know, this was in 2019. And then, you know, a few months later, the world shut down over the pandemic. And the interesting thing about Uber's trajectory up until that point was, we are a rights business. let's go make this business big and profitable. And Eats is sort of what we get by virtue of having all of these drivers in supply. And then when the pandemic happened, the world shut down, there were no rides. It was all Eats. ⁓ And overnight, the restaurants had one choice to make, which was get online or...

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm. cease to exist.

Anand Tumuluru: At this point, nobody even knew what the odd was, how long it was, when it's going to stop. The world just stalled and it was just like do or die thing. Exactly, cease to exist. And restaurants came online instantly and Uber pivoted its entire business model and entire teams to basically focus on rides, get them up. Engineers were sitting down to transcribe menus and get restaurants online. The third part that connected for me around this time was that I'm actually a restaurateur. And when I joined Uber back in 2017, I still had the startup bug. was thinking about a hundred different ideas. And the thing that seemed very obvious to me of all the things that I could actually build was a small restaurant. yes, ⁓ it was a very stupid idea. And I was made of ⁓ adequately by friends for... thinking of that idea my motivation was very simple. I really wanted to eat the kind of food that my grandma makes and I felt like I was not do it and you know my in the future generation are basically not going to get sort of that specific you know South Indian vegetarian food made in a very specific way. And funnily enough, even though I was in India at this time, there weren't commercialized versions of that recipe. So a very classic food entrepreneur's dream. It's like, me go build something I like, something for So I built this. I never actually thought anything big of it. I ended up starting it with my friends. It actually continues to operate till date, even today. ⁓ And one of closest friends is an operating partner.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Uh-huh.

Anand Tumuluru: still operates it today. This is in Hyderabad, India. But back then, it was an experiment. It was a fun, passionate project. And guess what? Not only was it successful, ⁓ it up becoming actually cash flow positive in six months. We were actually to make money. And there was no behind the specific. item or recipe wasn't like, wasn't the future McDonald's. The simplest thing we did was we actually, the only decision we made there was let's basically make sure that everything we do is digital. So we basically had Swiggy and Zomato, you taking orders. We basically had all of the payments come through, you know, UPI, which is India's payment rails. We were spending $0 on software. Everything we did was... could actually come into an Excel sheet. And the business ended up becoming successful because of that. at time, ⁓ this free pandemic. For me, it was just one instance of success. And I was happy about it. Never thought anything about it. But then when delivery happened, things changed. Everything changed. So that was sort of the origin or the backstory before we started Loop.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah. Yeah, so I think it's really funny because you've got really three of the components. You've got the accounting background, receivables and understanding what a general ledger looks like from some of early days working at Uber and understanding how kind of the delivery model works. And then the fact that you've been a successful restaurateur, I guess, give us a high level of review for people that didn't listen to the show when you came on the first time. Because I think when you were on the first time, was the first time I had actually even heard of Loop. And since then, I've been kind of watching your journey and I'm excited to dig into kind of where it's gone. But what does Loop do and kind of, you know, your elevator pitch at a high level? What is Loop AI?

Anand Tumuluru: LoopAI is a delivery intelligence platform that helps restaurants have their delivery revenue profitable ⁓ and ⁓ So we basically a back office that's helping restaurants optimize their finances, marketing, and operations. And ultimately, the problem that we're going after is that for restaurants that want to go meet customers where they are. How can we as a restaurant, ⁓ restaurateur, background, as people with a restaurant and engineering background, help them actually lean into it in a way where they don't feel like it's overwhelming or it's a necessary evil or any of the monikers that people apply to delivery over time and actually see it as a future, as a good part of the future, and lean into it in a way where they basically use it as a superpower, right? go acquire new customers, to go actually meet all of these younger audiences and with without actually losing money on the flow through side. So we ended up building effectively a suite of that optimizes the operations, finances marketing ⁓ part of the business.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, and I think taking this back, you know, five years ago, and we were recording this in early 2026, you know, five, six years ago when kind of the pandemic hit, as you said, a lot of people jumped on these delivery platforms, but didn't necessarily make them a core piece of their business model. It was, I've got to do this because I can't, you know, no longer have people coming into the dining room. You know, things have shut down because of the pandemic. They jumped on these delivery platforms, but they didn't architect, they didn't design it into. their modeling from their packaging to their food to their marketing to their delivery products, even their menu offerings, their pricing, all of those things were part of what people jumped into because they had to, as you stated kind of in the early inception. But now we've had a little bit of time, a little bit of maturity. Obviously, there are a lot of brands that are just knocking it out of the park, but some are also still struggling. So I'd love for you to kind of talk about how and why you thought this was such a a great piece of technology to help these brands because to your point, there's a lot of people that, it's a necessary evil or I hate this delivery thing, or it's just taking volume from me or it's taking money from me or all of the different things that you continue to hear and why I guess you were so contrarian with the solution that you had because I, like you, recognize it's the future and if you don't do it well, you're at a disadvantage to others. So I'd love for you to kind of talk a little bit about kind of the how and why before we jump into kind of what's changed over the last couple of years.

Anand Tumuluru: ⁓ Yeah, absolutely. If you allow me, I'll take the liberty to go back maybe even a hundred years. I like to play around as an intellectual debate with some of my friends and even restaurant, restaurateurs who allow me to where, when they ask me why delivery is sort of this necessary evil or customers are being taken away, I ask them like, what's the alternative? the alternative thing that restaurants needed to do? And it's like, hey, ⁓ customers should instead come to the drive-through, right? Or they should come and sit at the restaurant. Well, played back to the 1960s or 70s, the drive-through revolution when it was happening, guess what restaurants said? What the hell is drive-through? Why are people eating in cars? ⁓ They better to the restaurants. And how about this? Back in the late when the first wave of urbanization was happening and people were actually leaving small towns into cities, that fundamental economic migration basically powered the need for packaged goods, Heinz Ketchup and and so on and so forth. Kellogg actually came from that time. Guess what people were saying? They said, you should. Be an agrarian economy, just go back into the farm, make your own food. Why do you want to eat packaged food that's coming from elsewhere? So technology always feels that way. ⁓ there is a new thing that's happening, it always feels like, hey, why don't we just go back to the older ⁓ and do it the way that it was supposed to be? And it's like, you go long enough back, it's like, what was the thing that was? You know, that was happening that wasn't supposed to be and you can, you know, can kind of feel the layers. interesting thing that I always like remind people of is, ⁓ that you look at drive-throughs, right, the reason drive-throughs came was because of an interstate system, ⁓ you know, of the Eisenhower interstate system where there were these large roads that were set up from, you know, that enabled suburbia to come. There was this industrial revolution that was happening and people were actually driving from long distances to go to work and actually go places. Cars were growing and drive-throughs and fast food exactly where it needed to in terms of giving people that fast calorie intake that them to go ⁓ into If you basically draw parallels to what's happening now, it's hiding in plain sight. The thing that happened was we had internet. we had mobile phones that came from internet, and most importantly, we had social networks. Social networks, not just in the form of Facebook or TikTok, but in terms of group chats, WhatsApp ⁓ just plain old iMessage, text chats, where there is so much social discovery that's happening. So ⁓ just like the interstate system, we have these rails that are fundamentally driving consumers to go do what exactly? to do the same thing that they've been doing for the past 120, 200 years, which is opt in for convenience, right? Not go back to the kitchen or the farm, right? And make it very easy for them to get the meal so that they can go do whatever they like doing. And it's the same theme again, Jeremy, which is 200 years ago, trust me, we did not have Asian cuisine in the US, right? Trust me, we did not even have burgers and pizzas before like.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah.

Anand Tumuluru: you know, 70 years. As time passed, we actually end up with more selection, right? Because when you actually allow for specialization of labor, when you actually allow for restaurants and all of these cuisines to come up, we actually live in a cuisine-rich world. And for delivery marketplaces, for instance, selection is a very big criteria. And that's one of the things that a lot of restaurant brands wonder, hey, I have an amazing app, why aren't they coming here? Because ultimately, a consumer only has 10 or 20 apps, and they're choosing the one that has a thousand restaurants over, you know, just one. everything else being equal, assuming everything else is equal, your price, your convenience, so on and so forth. So I think the point here is that this is not like a today phenomena or it is not a US phenomenon or New York phenomenon. This is a global phenomenon. Same thing that's happening in China, India, Asia, South America is happening in the US. Consumers are actually going and opting in for this. And that has gone through a level of maturity today where it's a $150 billion business. The same business was barely $5 billion 10 years ago, and it's a massive business. And it's growing at 20 % year on year if you listen to the earnings reports from marketplaces or what Olu is saying or what any of the digital audience platforms are saying. It's a global phenomenon. It's happening everywhere. Consumers are overwhelmingly choosing to get food from outside on digital channels instead of going back into the kitchen and cooking for themselves. That has effectively matured and today we live in a world where brands are seeing 20, 30 % of their revenue and sort of pulling in and going into that $150 billion revenue pool that consumers have created and dipping into it through marketplaces, through catering, through their own online channels, so on and so forth.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: So tell me a little bit, and again, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Funny enough, I was on a conference call a week or two ago and somebody's like, hang on just a second. My daughter is ordering from Chipotle on DoorDash and I don't understand and the daughter's like 12, but I think across the board, I was just having dinner with my brother and his fiance last night in New York and they were sitting in a Thai restaurant and they'd been inside of the Thai restaurant one time before last night. But every other experience and they ordered it from there twice a month. but they order it via takeout and via DoorDash and the food shows up to their door. So across the board, that brand, had they not been on the marketplace or had they not given them, the consumers, the ability to do that, it would have precluded them. And there's three other Thai restaurants on that same block that they probably would have ordered from based on both convenience and based on the fact that they were in the mood for Thai food and this place delivered, it was convenient. It was affordable in the price point that they needed it. so all of those different things. So I agree with you, ⁓ reason for us to understand that. But now let's talk a little bit about what does Loop do to help? Because I think there's two sides of the Loop equation. And I think you guys have built more than ⁓ you had two years ago when we last talked. But ⁓ talk a little bit about kind of, guess, the ⁓ side of what Loop does ⁓ manage and help ⁓ that now recognize. I have to be on this platform, but how do I do it well and in a way that I can make it profitable and not feel like I'm at the mercy of these large tech companies.

Anand Tumuluru: Absolutely. So loop does ⁓ it ⁓ protect and grow as a framework. applies that framework to delivery revenue. ⁓ measure is effectively, let's reconcile everything. Make sure that we are actually able to understand what our ratings are, what our operational issues are, what our errors are, and our marketing is actually getting us, the market spend is actually giving us on the dollars. At the end of the day, the most important thing, and if there is one thing that the listeners take away from this, session is understand the flow through ⁓ delivery is offering. Contrary to everything you hear, understanding the flow through from delivery is very straightforward. And just to double on why I say that, delivery is the only revenue channel where you actually have fully attributed marketing spend. your entire cohorts of customers in terms of new or old, not a sample, not a 10, 20 % sample that you might get from a loyalty system or a digital audience system, 100 % of your customer base, you can actually cohort them. How many of them came back? What is the retention? How many of them have loyalty with marketplaces on and so forth? You can actually understand what feedback they left. they have actually, let's say, made a refund request, you can actually understand what these specific items were that were wrong. You can connect it with your item prices, item costs, and understand what the cost was. You can understand what the labor impact was. You can actually look at a fully attributed model of how this channel is giving you a flow through fully. ⁓

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: So talk to me real quick about that. to cut you off, I want to, without something like loop, how do they do that? Because it feels like that's almost overwhelming. And I'm not saying that to be disrespectful to these platforms, but you've got two or three different delivery channels. And I know you guys aggregate it and make it so much simpler, but it feels like you're playing that old game at the carnival whack-a-mole where the mole pops and set up, you hit it here, and then you go to the next one and you go to the next one. I know you guys do a lot to aggregate that and help them, but.

Anand Tumuluru: Yeah.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Is it even able to be done manually if I had somebody that that was their full-time job or whatever without your guys's platform?

Anand Tumuluru: I have done this manually. Jeremy and I'm an engineer. I'm an analytical person. I love spreadsheets and Excel sheets. It's hard, right? It's pretty hard to do it. It can be done, right? But I think you're 100 % right. It's very overwhelming. I'll talk shortly about what we do specifically there. But I think the thing that I want to bring focus to is that it can be done as against your customer, your guest who actually comes into the store, you're not going to spend time asking every guest, did you read about us on a banner? What's name of the person that told you? Let me go back and figure out how much cost I spent to get this guest inside the door. None of that's actually even possible elsewhere. You can actually do it. But doing it is very cumbersome. The way that we actually make it super easy is we actually, with Lou, you can actually go live. with your entire platform in a week, where you can connect your delivery revenue, your digital ordering, your point of sale, with your ERP systems. See the actual flow through numbers. Look at what happened in the past year across the different campaigns, different events that you had. And you can also project out what's going to happen in the next year, all within 30 minutes. So all you have to do is sit down and just look at this and that understanding and control. So the key thing here is what you said about sort of understanding all of the complexity of these reports and really trying to look at what your flow through is very cumbersome. But I think you're actually doing injustice to that activity by saying, by almost saying that it somehow existed before, right?

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Anand Tumuluru: Like it did not, right? Like nobody actually had, like there is no part of the restaurant's revenue stream or marketing spend or sort of their flow through or there isn't like a single revenue channel where they basically have a very clear flow through understanding unless they just have one, which is like, okay, customers, there is a model. Sure. There is a, there is a store model. So there's a theoretical number, but the actual breakdown by channel was not even feasible. in a lot of ways, most restaurants are actually, they do. small and big do not have the framework to actually do that kind of analysis because it does not exist anywhere else. So when you're actually doing it for the first time and trying to understand it across all of these tens and tens of reports across each of your single digital channel, it can become overwhelming really fast. the hard thing about actually at the support is For you to understand what's happening from a marketing standpoint and an operation standpoint and then correlate it with what is a benchmark, what does it actually need to be, and what's the headroom, that process is going to take several weeks if not months to get to the bottom of. And that's basically what Loop is magically offering for you.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Well, and that, guess, was my next line of questioning is this. So how do you guys serve up that data to be able to help them make better business decisions? Because we say it all the time on the show, tech for tech's sake is worthless, but tech that truly is going to drive guest experience and staff experience is where people need to be investing their time and money. And so I'm projecting, and I'll let you talk more about it, is you're going to deliver back to them. You've got problems with operations. You've got problems with the packaging. You've got problems with the drivers, whatever it is, you've got problems with charge backs. You've got problems in these areas to be able to deliver back operational goods the restaurant tour. You've got a pricing problem because your cogs are off. So I'd love for you to talk through the different data elements ⁓ that you guys are able to ascertain and give back to the operators ⁓ so that can make better business decisions ⁓ so that they can not only retain those clients, but get them to keep coming back.

Anand Tumuluru: Absolutely. We talk about this a lot with our loop ⁓ users, Jeremy. So ⁓ loop is not a dashboard. It's a workflow. So high-level overview of how we actually make this possible is basically three buckets. And I'll give you a couple of examples in each of those. So with respect to accounting, the central thing there is taxes are very complex with market place with withholdings, market place withholdings, all kinds of local tax regimes. And ⁓ especially with price differences between point of sale versus what you're actually listing on the marketplaces, things can get really complex and actually what's the tax liability. And then you throw in chargebacks, you throw in marketing, food-related promotions, et cetera. I can guarantee you that if you actually look at ⁓ restaurants like tax liability with respect to what they're paying versus what they need to pay, they're all overpaying. And we have delivered like

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: off.

Anand Tumuluru: 5 % of the entire revenue was like what a very popular brand was actually overpaying. And we helped reduce that, not to call anybody specific out. It's not like a local problem. It's it's true for everybody because that data hops through so many systems, right? Your order aggregator, your point of sale, something that connects from that to your ERP and then your ERP system. And then by the time you have a controller or your tax analyst looks at it, that data is like very hard to get to sort of the... source and really understand what's happening. we help sort of size that really well.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Can I ask one or make a clarifying statement real quick about taxes? Cause I was just on a phone with a brand recently. understanding, and I'd love for you to correct this and at least educate our listeners is ⁓ a product is being delivered, ⁓ are to charge the tax rate where the product is being delivered to. If third party aggregator is using their pickup ⁓ model, then gets charged to the tax of where the restaurant brand is. Is that correct?

Anand Tumuluru: That's correct. And in addition, there's a lot of states where the marketplace itself does the tax reduction and pays it, remits it to the tax authorities on your behalf. So you shouldn't be paying taxes for those. And in some states, the marketplaces have different treatments for it. So there's a lot of very interesting things there. I think the... one example, Paxos is one example of how your ⁓ delivery being transformed and into your ERP system as a journal entry can actually have an impact on your actual flow through. So the first thing we do is we get in there and we ⁓ automatically send journal entries into the ERP system. So we have integrations with every system out there. Ultimately, what we're doing is we're pushing those and taking that work away from ⁓ many accountants that are actually spending weekends trying to understand this new report that came from the marketplace and trying to cast ⁓ it transform it and put in the ERP system. And by default, that taxes, that addresses the royalty ⁓ piece of delivery that effectively helps the CFO understand. How much should I actually spend in commissions versus marketing versus different aspects of revenue? Very So that basically call as measure. And the second aspect of loop is protect, is what you're basically saying. ⁓ I want ⁓ quickly sort talk about the operational issues that one might have with respect to delivery. So one of the big problems that brands have and marketplace have and consumers have, it's a lose, lose, lose for everybody. is if I basically order something on delivery, it won't come to me properly. Or the restaurant might say, ⁓ delivery is an area where I don't like way my food gets presented to a customer. Or ⁓ marketplaces, trust me, ⁓ lot of people don't see the marketplace angle here. Marketplaces hate chargebacks, hate downtime, hate canceled orders, and all of these things, fundamentally because it actually costs them a ton of money. In fact, For more than half of the issues that actually happen with both customers and they actually deal with the drivers or delivery folks as well, they actually compete automatically. And yet, there are still all of these issues that the restaurants actually face as well. So it's a lose, lose, lose for everybody. ⁓ some of them could be fraudulent. Some of them could be actually restaurant attributed. One the fundamental questions that is like, ⁓ what it that I can do? as a restaurant operator to effectively make sure that the customer that I'm actually serving on these marketplaces, they get a great experience. And what am I overlooking? What can I actually like figure out in terms of the best experience? I'll give you a very simple example. One of the funny things that happened, you know, this happened a few years ago now, very early on is every customer that ordered the specific salad from a customer on loop effectively would report that they were missing chicken in the salad. And, um, and they had a very high error rate. would request a chargeback. The restaurant was very angry because it's like, you know, the customer's product, you learn what do they mean? They need a chicken salad. You know, there's not a chicken salad. Why are they expecting chicken? You know, the market places where like your error rates are very high. So when we came in, the first thing we did was we looked at that error and we realized that it was like the systematic issue. And the issue was they actually had the wrong image on the marketplace menu where they basically had a chicken on it. And it's like, wait a second. All we needed to do was update it. That represented item. And then it was instantly gone. Such simple issue. ⁓ Another ⁓ really example of this is there was a restaurant that basically turned off television channels ⁓ right around Thanksgiving. came back, they did a reset, they forgot turning one marketplace on. they basically turned it off for like ⁓ after that until Lou basically came in and they said, hey, why is this turned off? Because it turns that they just did not even know that they weren't serving customers that coming from the channel directly. It's like such a simple operational mistake. But that's what happens when you basically have 20 different channels and you have to maintain all of them. So another very simple example. then another third really common mistake that happens a lot is the way that you design your menu in terms of modifiers can be very, very painful for the customer. So they might basically say that you have to add, let's say, a side of fries for this entree. And the side of fries in the entree is just sort of listed at the bottom of a bunch of other modifiers, which are like smaller modifiers. And you don't see that you actually need to add one more, you know, sort of, you know, side of fries and add this other package next to sort of this entree. And that was one of, you know, it's such a small printing sort of representation issue on the ticket. And this specific was seeing just so many issues come from that because Every time they basically send it out, they're just missing a set of fries. So the operational issue there was like, actually missing the fries on the line. And all you needed to do was highlight that better and actually count the number of packages that leave the delivery counter. So another very simple example of the kind of issue that can all of these three, by the way, are issues that didn't exist before delivery was created. ⁓ coming in today that new.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yep.

Anand Tumuluru: the question is how operators work with it. And I'll just close with one sort of new product launch that we actually recently did. So, you know, ⁓ people wonder, what, all of this AI hype is great. How is that actually helping me? Right? So a very good example of this is, you know, we see so many store managers whenever we ⁓ used hop on calls with them before, or we would give them training and a lot of them would actually take it on their cars. They would have a mount, they'd be sitting, they'd be driving and they'd be like, okay, great. keep, you know, I'm comfortable doing this, keep talking. And we're like, what are you doing? Like, that is so dangerous. This is not worth it. ⁓ You know, this training call is not worth it. So finally, we actually built out a voice app, which is, by the way, very easy to do. We're calling it Samantha. We're calling her Samantha. You can actually set up Loop in a way where she calls you on a Monday afternoon to give you a debrief of everything that happened last week, and you can talk to her. Right. And she can respond to you on all of the operational issues that had happened. So it's just such a simple solve where it's like, you don't have to sit in front of a dashboard, you know, speak of like actually delivering issues and operational issues to the last mile. The thing is like, how do you actually give it, get it to the hand of busy general managers? It's not just a PDF on your phone that you have to open while you're driving anymore. It's actually a call that you can get on, which is what all of the store managers do all the time. They're on calls all the time. So this is one of.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: ⁓ wow.

Anand Tumuluru: another sort of coworker Samantha who looked at your operational issues and you can just talk to her and that's the end of

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Well, and that's one of the things that I love about what you guys are doing with Loop is because you guys, mean, one, you're an operator at heart. You've operated restaurants. You get it. You also were in the accounting world. So you understand how painful it is to do the reconciliation of the taxes. And so, you know, I love that you guys have got this and this is not AI for AI sake. This is AI to truly solve a business challenge. That business challenge was Nobody was getting the data to make themselves better in the way that they needed to receive it. So now being able to talk to Samantha, as you've dubbed her, ability to have that ongoing conversation is going to ⁓ to solve that. I guess, where are things going ⁓ kind of the, you know, in, in loop's world? Where, ⁓ where you guys going? Where do you see it continuing to go? ⁓ I see a use for AI where it's now aggregating and benchmarking you against others. Number one and number two, if you continue to have the same problem as Samantha continues to recognize, hey, you continue to miss the dressing, now figuring out another way to alert. Those are two things that I guess if I were in a place that I was operating, I'd love to see. But I guess where are you guys thinking this is going to go?

Anand Tumuluru: Yeah, great question. So we are all very excited for every new model launch. Every time a new LLM comes in, it unlocks a ton of capabilities. One of powerful capabilities that actually got launched from a recent model release is the ability to actually have a financial assistant. as a CFO is working on their Excel sheets for all kinds of projections and hypothetical for the future, but also pulling data from the past. ⁓ basically what we launched is ⁓ a called LoopQuant. So it's basically an Excel sheet, but it basically has AI that you can type your natural language questions to. It goes and pulls your data from your ERP system, your point of sale system. you know, your third party delivery, on and so forth, and puts things together like, compare my restaurants P &L with a public company's P &L, right? And you can actually look at all of the top 10 public companies out there and actually benchmark against it. Or do things like help me project out what kind of store goals I can set for the entirety of next year. And you can actually sit and do that in plain text, you know, with the AI going and... applying all kinds of formulas, pulling data from your back end, and doing all of those transformations in front of your own eyes. in terms of where we are going effectively, we are building a coworker, an agentic coworker, an AI coworker that can actually help simplify these things for you. It could be Quant, could be Samantha. Another coworker we have is a ⁓ chatbot called Don Draper, where you can actually off-mat ⁓

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Don Draper, the marketing guy.

Anand Tumuluru: Yeah, from Admin fame. Exactly. we actually have, so I was just looking through this. had about 60 sessions yesterday where all of our users were sitting down and sort of talking to Don Ripper in terms of what are all the things that we could be doing? So do I need to invest in ads, promotions? What happened to this specific location on this specific day? The way that you would talk to sort of a marketing consultant or a marketing analyst. So one of the central things that AI is actually doing is simplifying natural language interfaces into extremely technical and complex aspects of data. So two things that were impossible to do. Number one, a fully attributed digitized version of every customer, every order, every single rating feedback, and actual flow through on every single order. That was impossible pre-delivery. that happened, so Loop is doing that. And now on top of that, you can actually go and have natural language conversations with it. You can actually build out Excel sheet models with it. You can actually go and literally talk to it over the phone. And think that combination is effectively setting up our restaurant partners, ⁓ Jeremy, success in a way where not only are they meeting customers where they are in their own terms, ⁓ they're setting up their brand for success by lapping 10, 20 % growth year on year on delivery, doing that profitably actually being excited about that revenue channel as the place where they're able to have the most amount of control. They're able to actually do the ⁓ amount of tests. ⁓ could actually hypothesis, what if I did this? What if I did that? In the regular store, if you actually did a test, it will take you weeks, if not months before you understand the flow through impact, all of the impact it has on marketing, so on and so forth. But you're able to actually do that very easily on delivery and get a response in hours. So at the end of the day, that's the core of what we want to do with Loop. We want to enable more cuisines and more restaurants to come. We want to see more and more brands that go from 10 locations to 100 to 1,000 and live in a world with more richer selection of food. But do that in a way that's profitable, that's growing, and that's relevant for the next decade of know, brand building for restaurants.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Well, and the thing I was, I was really going to ask the question. think you answered it in, in that last response, which was really what's the impact and you're seeing double digit or more impact to people's bottom line in this channel. So the fact that you guys are helping on the cost saving side, you talked about taxes earlier helping to drive. And the part that I love about it is win, win, win. It's the delivery companies are in a better place. The restaurateur is in a better place. And ultimately the consumer is in a better place because you guys have been able to do all three. You you really are matching all three of the constituents to make things better. Whereas in a disconnected world, you're just kind of fighting, you know, fighting in as a restaurateur, you don't know what to do and you end up hurting yourself. So how do people get in touch? How do people like what you say you can get somebody up so quickly and you know, I guess you're the founder. So ⁓ I guess if you're saying it, then chances are it's going to happen. And I've talked to other customers that have done this, but a lot of people like, there's no way he can get me up and going that quickly. I guess tell them where they should go. What is the experience going to look like if they were to hear this and go, I need this now.

Anand Tumuluru: Absolutely. So you can go to loopai.com right now, set up some time with us. We will get you onboarded as soon as ⁓ a week and depending on some complex setups in ⁓ a of weeks. And ⁓ you ⁓ effectively, the minimum, get a sense of what your flow through on delivery is. And you can get a sense of how you benchmark against other brands. And my central takeaway here is that brands on loop effectively saw a 10 % year on year growth. and their flow through on delivery in a lot of cases are actually higher than what it is for in store. But even in the, even in cases where people want to be aggressive, it's not worse than 20%. ⁓ So, so let's say you have 16 % margin on your in store revenue. should have one to 14 % on delivery, not worse. So don't to anything else. You can actually get to, you know, double digit growth on delivery. You can actually do it in a way that that's profitable for you. And ⁓ if you want to find out how just reach out to us on loopayer.com and we'll get you set up ⁓ up and running.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: love it. I'm for what you guys have done. There's no other products out there that I've seen out in the market space that are really doing all of the things that you guys are doing. ⁓ There that are kind of taking care of one slice of it or another slice of it, but I love that you guys have really ⁓ pulled of those things together. I'm grateful that you guys have built it and I'm ⁓ a standing on the sideline cheering you guys on and ⁓ excited. for coming on the show again to our listeners guys. ⁓ You have got lots of choices, so thanks for hanging out. today. ⁓ If you guys have any other guests that you guys would want us to have on the show, please let us know. were joking about the fact that ⁓ you continue to run into people out of ⁓ shows that have been on the show. So I love that. And it's always fun to deliver back to our listeners ⁓ who are out there every day fighting a good fight ⁓ to things better. So ⁓ thank Luke, for what you guys do and make it a great day.

Anand Tumuluru: Thanks for your ma-