CEO and cofounder Adam Guild, who is both a Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 under 30 alumnus, first launched Owner, then called Placepull, in 2018 after he built a website to support his mother’s dog grooming business.Boris Zharkov Photography 2023 Local chains and mom-and-pop restaurants are perhaps the last places you'd envision using AI. But thanks to Owner, a startup that provides digital services like mobile app creation and now AI-powered marketing and website optimization for more than 10,000 restaurants, Florida-based Talkin' Tacos has been able to increase the number of locations it operates and grow annual sales to more than $60 million. "We've had hundreds of customers drive hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional profit,” Owner CEO and cofounder Adam Guild told Forbes. “We saw this coming when we started playing with GPT-3 at the time, and the way it's evolved has surpassed our wildest expectations,” referencing OpenAI’s earlier large language model released in 2020. That success helped Owner close a $120 million fundraise co-led by Meritech Capital and Headline Growth, vaulting it to a $1 billion valuation just over a year after raising a $33 million Series B — and just eight months after being on Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Owner provides software to manage mobile food orders, organize marketing campaigns, generate a search engine-friendly website, build a mobile app and set up a loyalty program, all without needing to write a single line of code. To start the process for free, a user simply enters their restaurant's name into a search bar, and Owner pulls information from the web to evaluate its current standings. With the purchase of a monthly $499 subscription, it then automatically generates a website based on what it finds online and creates optimized text that the user can edit. The websites also implement ordering and delivery systems, where Owner takes a smaller fee than other delivery platforms, and use an image editing AI program to improve photos of menu items. Owner’s website said it can do all this in about a week or less. From there, it continues to recommend ways to boost the website and expand sales with other offerings. It’s “leveling the playing field and making it so that independent restaurant owners don't get crushed by large corporations, but instead get empowered by this tech,” Guild said. He envisions Owner as a one-stop shop for restaurant owners to manage and market their businesses. The company has also incorporated generative AI into these tools to help draft emails or to improve website text to bolster search engine rankings. Its biggest upcoming product, which is currently available but expected to be released broadly later this year, is a set of what the company calls “AI executives” to provide advice on finances and marketing. Restaurant owners can chat with these bots, which can do things like remind a business owner that they’re out of an ingredient and disable that dish on the menu, or share how sales performed that month.These chatbots are “cobbled together” from several different AI models from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Stability and trained on data collected from the menus and orders of the thousands of restaurants using its platform, Guild said. Owner’s own revenue has grown, too. Guild declined to share a specific number or discuss profitability but said that it has now reached “multiple tens of millions.” The company currently has 200 employees. Besides expanding its offerings, Guild said the new raise enabled Owner to bring on strategic investors like Shalini Rao, a partner at Headline Growth and co-lead on the round, who is known for being part of Toast’s Series C round. “This is a company that has been on our radar for a very long time,” Rao said. Guild, who is both a Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 under 30 alumnus, first launched Owner, then called Placepull, in 2018 after he built a website to support his mother’s dog grooming business. He raised millions in a seed round from angel investors like Tinder founder Sean Rad and Kimbal Musk in 2020. (Guild says Musk’s investment came from his interest in restauranting, adding the two remain connected.) The new billion-dollar valuation is a big jump from its January 2024 funding round, which valued the company at just $200 million and landed the company on Forbes’ list of Next Billion Dollar Startups. Jack Altman, an Owner investor who founded management tech firm Lattice, told Forbes it's less of a surprise to him. “It's been doing well for a while now, and it's definitely accelerating and the momentum builds,” he said. Altman first invested in his company at the seed stage in 2020 and has reinvested in each round, he said. Even Guild admitted he hadn’t intended to raise additional funding so quickly. “About a month ago, I poked my head up from building product and talking to customers, “ he said. “I had a few conversations with investors and sharing our data, and within six days of sharing our data with investors, we had six offers.” Several angel investors Investors point to Guild’s devotion as a big reason for their bet. Guild told Forbes that he hasn’t taken a day off since he founded the company, and that he spends his Saturdays filming videos and marketing materials for the company’s YouTube channel, which rakes in millions of views with videos catered to the restaurant world. The channel’s most popular video provides information on calculating food costs, while his most recent video is an interview with an Owner success story. He took some inspiration from his younger brother, Topper Guild, who has a following of more than 62 million on YouTube. That channel helped bring Alex Kurland, a general partner at Meritech Capital and co-lead of the round, on board to invest. He told Forbes that Guild’s YouTube videos helped him understand Owner’s potential, which he views as similar to DoorDash, another of his investments. “In the restaurant vertical, with cloud, you saw the Toast point-of-sale be built; with mobile, you saw DoorDash being built, and I think with AI, you're going to see Owner build a very large company,” Kurland said.