Palona AI has launched a multimodal AI platform for restaurants, built to handle phone calls, catering requests, private events, and large-order inquiries that most operators miss. The company said the system is already deployed with chains including Din Tai Fung, Mountain Mike's Pizza, Giordano's, Rooted Hospitality, and Cali BBQ, and the launch comes as Palona closes a Series A round that brings total funding to $20 million.
Investors in the round include Ardenwood Ventures, CrimsonOx, UpHonest, Turbo, Llama Ventures, Neo, Fusion Fund, and Defy, with participation from other institutional and individual backers.
An operating layer for physical businesses
Palona describes its platform as an AI operating layer that connects customer demand, live operations, and automated action. The product suite is built around revenue expansion, revenue intelligence, and operations excellence. It captures demand from phone calls, catering requests, private events, and large-order inquiries, then flags intent, value, and urgency for managers.
That process runs as a continuous loop: capture, understand, act, learn. The platform integrates with existing point-of-sale, scheduling, and CRM systems, and offers a dashboard that gives operators a single view of metrics from order volumes to customer satisfaction.
"Physical businesses need AI that can understand what is happening and act in real time," said Maria Zhang, founder and CEO of Palona AI. "Palona turns demand, operational context and live signals into actions that drive revenue, quality and execution."
Palona holds U.S. Patent No. 12,481,517 for orchestrating specialized AI agents, designed to adapt to user needs, performance levels, and operational patterns in real time. The company also said it developed a proprietary "Interaction Model for Physical AI" that tracks how people, objects, locations, and processes relate over time, going beyond object detection and scene description.
Hospitability results
Palona pointed to early operator results. A production study covering Cali BBQ, Rooted Hospitality, and Giordano's recorded 481 orders across 194 location-days and identified 305 large-order and catering inquiries across seven restaurants.
Cali BBQ, which has used the platform for more than a year, saw Father's Day revenue rise 20% year over year. The chain says Palona became its highest average-order-value channel as the platform expanded to cover catering and large orders.
"Before Palona, calls we couldn't answer represented demand we couldn't capture," said Shawn Walchef, CEO of Cali BBQ. "Now we're converting more of those conversations into orders and identifying catering opportunities we previously had no dedicated process to handle. For an operator, that's where AI becomes real. It creates measurable revenue while helping the team execute better."
The company offers a flexible deployment model and tiered pricing that scales with number of locations and order volume. It also integrates with existing point-of-sale, scheduling, and CRM systems.
What's next for Palona AI
Restaurants are the initial market. The company plans to extend to retail, hospitality, and healthcare where real-world operations and customer interactions are high-stakes.
Palona is actively testing its solutions with enterprise partners in multiple sectors and plans to expand into additional verticals in the coming quarters.
"We are seeing a shift where AI is no longer a novelty, but a necessity for competitiveness in the restaurant industry," Zhang said. "Our goal is to make AI the everyday operational tool that pays for itself through increased revenue and cost savings."
Why this matters for hospitality and events professionals
Restaurant operators are routinely losing revenue to missed calls that result in private events. The entire conferences and events team at a venue is often a handful of people who can't answer every phone ring, and industry is now stripping away that structural limit. Catering inquiries, and management of guest functions is a market shift that becomes a tool you can deploy.
AI trained on your operation and managers quickly reaching out for new leads and service opportunities is available as a more proactive, sized deployment that scales with your locations. For hospitality and events professionals, this demonstrates the shift in how service management operations is measured - an operational discipline with tools that work in a performance-based or outcome-based model. A team's software is no longer simply a tracker of what happened, but a system that makes sure the next available human has actionable insights to close revenue - and that should be the standard for an industry where missed demand is occasionally an unavoidable, accepted cost.
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