Drive-thru AI supplier Presto Phoenix has raised $10 million to help accelerate its growth.
The funding was led by Metropolitan Partners Group, with contributions from Remus Capital, Link Ventures and several strategic angel investors.
Metropolitan and Remus are part of the group that acquired Presto one year ago after Metropolitan foreclosed on the business. The group also invested an additional $18 million in Presto at that time.
The San Mateo, California-based company hopes the additional funding can help it continue the momentum it has built since then. Presto’s technology, which uses voice AI to take orders in the drive-thru, is now used by 12 restaurant brands across hundreds of locations, making Presto one of the largest suppliers of its kind in the industry. This year, it wants to become the clear No. 1, said co-founder Krishna Gupta.
“There's a lot of noise right now in the market … but if you drill down a layer and you say, ‘Who actually has live deployments across many brands?’ you're kind of already down to basically just us,” he said. “My goal is, by the end of the year, that is clear to everybody in the industry, and it's not as noisy. I think you're gonna see a winnowing.”
Presto’s current customers include Taco John’s, Hardee’s/Carl’s Jr. and Fazoli’s. Gupta said the company wants to be in thousands of restaurant locations by the end of 2026. The new funding will help with that, and it will also help Presto to continue developing new products.
Last year, Presto unified its menu management system, which it says makes its technology more scalable. It also got better at capturing data from transactions and made its AI bots sound more human via a partnership with AI voice company ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski contributed to the latest fundraise.
Presto’s order accuracy rate also improved, though Gupta declined to provide a specific number.
Drive-thru voice AI has been one of the biggest tech trends in the restaurant industry in recent years. Many fast-food chains, including big brands like Taco Bell and Wendy’s, are pursuing the technology, with the goal of lowering their labor costs and boosting sales via automated upsells.
But the technology has also faced skepticism, with some wondering if it’s really ready for prime time.
“I think it is, but I think in every industry, getting to the point where technology is ready or where AI is ready, you have a curve,” Gupta said. “It starts by working with smaller brands and franchisees, and I think especially in AI and especially in an industry like this, because so many different parts have to work together well, you're not going to be perfect, right?”
Presto’s size and experience give it an advantage there, he said. And he believes that in just two or three years, drive-thru AI will be fully rolled out across most restaurant chains.
“And more than just fully rolled out, it will have instrumented these chains to become AI native,” he said. “And that's actually my number one thing: If you don't go down this path today, the ones who do and have learned from it and have then used it to instrument the entire business, you will fall behind them.”
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