Lilac Labs
We automate the person taking orders at drive-thrus with a voice AI
About Lilac Labs
At Lilac, we automate the person taking order at the drive thru with a voice AI. We're building this for Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) dealing with an historical labor shortage and rising wages.
Previous attempts at drive-thru voice ordering are costly to implement and have failed to deliver the accuracy and latency needed. It's now possible to build a voice interface that passes the threshold for a great customer experience.
In the United States, there are 200,000 Drive-Thrus handling 6 Billion visits a year. At 3 minutes per order, that's 34,000 human years spent on taking orders annually. Per location, on average we can deliver around $100,000 of value in terms of labor savings, upsell revenue lift, and training costs.
Company details
Funding
Total raised
$4.2M
Last stage
Seed
Investors
Founders
Tony Kam
Studied EECS at UC Berkeley. Before Lilac Labs, worked at Tesla as an engineer owning the display and touch component of the infotainment system, and previously at Intel (manufacturing automation) and CloudMinds (robotics simulation).
LinkedIn
Shelden Shi
Shelden is the Co-Founder and CTO of Gini Agent. Shelden studied CS and CogSci at UC Berkeley. Before Gini, Shelden was the CTO of Lilac Labs, building the best drive-thru voice ordering product with the highest non-intervention rate. Prior to that, Shelden was the founding engineer at Symbolic, leading the development of a Fintech lending platform with ~$1B in AUM and 30k monthly active users.
LinkedInWhat happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.