About us

We're building the operating system for restaurant kitchens.

Founded 2024. Baltimore + Manhattan. 14 people. Backed by people who've run kitchens, not just written about them.

Our mission

Make every kitchen as consistent as the chef's best day.

US restaurants do $1 trillion in revenue every year. They lose 6–8% to inconsistency, waste, and silent compliance failures. CheffyIQ exists to close that gap.

Our story

From a frustrated CTO to 38 customers in 14 months

In late 2023, Adam (our CEO) was advising his uncle's chain of 8 restaurants in Charleston. Quality was inconsistent across outlets. Spot audits caught 4% of issues. Customers were leaving Yelp reviews like "the same dish tastes different every time."

He realized the problem wasn't training, recipes, or even talent. It was continuous observation at scale. No human can watch every dish in every kitchen at every shift. But AI cameras can.

CheffyIQ launched in March 2024 with one customer (Hearth & Stone). 14 months later: 38 customers, 214 cameras, 92 edge devices, 3.2 million dishes verified.

38
Customers
214
Cameras live
3.2M
Dishes verified
14
Team members
The team

Builders & chefs

AP
Adam Powell
Co-founder & CEO
Ex-product DoorDash. Wharton MBA.
SK
Steven Kennedy
Co-founder & CTO
Ex-ML Lead, Uber.
VK
Victor Cooper
Head of Sales
Ex-Toast the US.
RM
Rebecca Mitchell
Head of Customer Success
Ex-restaurant operator.
Backed by

Investors who know restaurants

$8.5M raised across Seed and Series A. Led by operators, not just spreadsheets.

FF
Forerunner Foods
Series A lead · 2026

Vertical food & restaurant tech fund. Previously: Toast (IPO), Sweetgreen.

CV
Coastline Ventures
Seed lead · 2024

Pre-seed and seed AI infrastructure fund. Portfolio: Hugging Face, Modal, Replicate.

+
Angel investors
12 individuals

Founders & operators from Toast, Sweetgreen, Chipotle, DoorDash, and Square.

Milestones

From idea to 38 customers in 24 months

Mar 2024 · Founded
Adam Powell and Steven Kennedy spin out of an internal Toast project to focus on AI vision for kitchen ops.
Jun 2024 · First customer live
Hearth & Stone (now an 18-outlet US chain) goes live as customer #1 with 4 cameras at one Federal Hill location.
Sep 2024 · $1.2M Seed
Coastline Ventures leads. Team grows to 6. AI model v1 fine-tuned on 80,000 frames of customer kitchen footage.
Feb 2025 · 10th customer
First multi-outlet QSR rollout (Patty Lab, 12 stores). Edge box v2 ships. SOC 2 audit kicked off.
Aug 2025 · 25 customers
Crossed 100 cameras live. Launched chef mobile app and FDA-ready audit pack export.
Jan 2026 · $7.3M Series A
Forerunner Foods leads. Team grows to 14. Opened Towson, MD headquarters. Plate-match v3 ships with CLIP embeddings.
Today · 38 customers, 214 cameras live
3.2 million dishes verified. Net retention 112%. Hiring across engineering, sales, and CS.

As seen in

Restaurant Dive QSR Magazine FOOD ON DEMAND Nation's Restaurant News TechCrunch

Read the coverage →

What we believe

Values that show up in every line of code

Chefs are partners

We never build features that surveil chefs without giving them the same data. Their app shows their score, their coaching, their progress.

Privacy by default

Video stays on the edge box. Faces blurred. Only metadata leaves the kitchen. We're SOC 2 candidates.

Outcomes, not features

Every quarter we ask customers what their compliance rate looks like. If it's not improving, we rebuild.

Want to join us?

We're hiring across engineering, sales, and CS. If kitchens excite you, we'd love to talk.

View open roles