Why We Invested in Hostie

If you walk into a restaurant on a Friday night, you’ll often see a team stretched in every direction. There are hosts seating tables, servers running food, a party of twelve awaiting separate checks, and, somewhere amid it all, a phone that will not stop ringing. 

Those calls often go unanswered in the chaos of operating a busy restaurant. But each one is a potential reservation or a takeout order. Sometimes it’s a regular customer who wants to check if their favorite dish is being served, or if their favorite server is working a shift.

Restaurant teams want to answer them, but it’s difficult. Staff are outnumbered and the volume is too high. That’s the problem Hostie is working to solve, and it’s why we’re excited to lead the company’s Series A, joined by a strong bench of investors and restaurant veterans, including Thomas Layton, former CEO of OpenTable; Mike Dodson, former SVP of Sales at OpenTable and board director at Resy; and Mike Stoppelman, former VP of Engineering at Yelp.

Hostie is a virtual concierge for restaurants. An AI system answers every call, text, and guest question in the restaurant’s own voice, books the reservation or takeout order, and hands it off to a human when one is needed. It plugs into the point-of-sale and reservation systems operators already use, so it doesn’t require complex new infrastructure. When the phone is covered, the restaurant team has time to serve the guests in front of them.

This investment fits within our Economic Health pillar of expanding access to opportunity and unlocking economic bottlenecks. Hospitality is a wide-reaching industry, touching hundreds of thousands of restaurants and millions of guest interactions every day. Hospitality is rooted in human connection, so when it comes to technology, our goal is to support innovation that elevates those human moments.

Over the past year, Hostie has grown its revenue tenfold. It has expanded to hundreds of restaurant partners across the country and has helped operators manage more than two million guest conversations, 24 million messages, and book 400,000 covers. What’s more, several hospitality groups already trust it, including Flour + Water Hospitality Group, Slanted Door, State Bird Provisions, and Wayfare Tavern. As Andrea Boyd, Director of Operations at Wayfare Tavern put it: when response times are faster, “we book more events, we have more sales, and we have more guests coming in the door.”

At Obvious, a bet on a company is also a bet on its leaders, who in Hostie’s case have lived with the problem they’re now solving. CEO Randall Hom spent years in tech at Instacart and Flexport before opening Back to Back, his own restaurant in San Francisco, where he was almost constantly buried in calls, texts, and emails. He called his longtime friend Brendan Wood, a software engineer who had been building at Uber & Lindy.ai, and the two decided to fix the problem for good. 

The team has a rare blend of hospitality instinct and technical depth, and it shows in a product whose seamlessness is expanding the pie for everyone it touches. Randall and Brendan are building an essential piece of infrastructure for an industry that’s often asked to do more with less. We’re excited to accelerate Hostie’s broader vision of transforming how restaurants connect with their guests at every touchpoint, across every channel.