Lilac Labs
Summer 2024We automate the person taking orders at drive-thrus with a voice AI
About Company
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.
Active Founders
Tony is the co-founder and CEO of Lilac Labs. Tony studied EECS at UC Berkeley where focus on operating systems. Before Lilac, Tony worked at Tesla as an engineer, where he owned the display and touch component of the infotainment system. Tony also worked on the performance and reliability of driving visualization. Prior to that, Tony worked on manufacturing automation at Intel and robotics simulation at CloudMinds.
Shelden is the Co-Founder and CTO of Lilac Labs. Shelden studied CS and CogSci at UC Berkeley, where he conducted research training ML models to predict emotions via audio data. Before Lilac, Shelden was the founding engineer at Symbolic, leading the development of a Fintech lending platform with ~$1B in AUM and 30k monthly active users. Prior to that, Shelden worked at Flatiron Health, an oncology data unicorn, where he trained and built the evaluation pipeline for cancer diagnostic models.