The co-founders of xtraCHEF — the restaurant invoice and back-of-house management platform acquired by Toast — are back with a new venture. Andrew Schwartz and Bhavik Patel have launched Tandem, an AI platform built to automate operational and administrative tasks across restaurant systems, with acclaimed chef and restaurateur Michael Schulson joining as Founding Partner. The Philadelphia-based company has closed an initial seed financing round and is already active in a pilot program spanning 100 restaurant locations.
The Problem They're Solving
Restaurant back-of-house operations run on a fragmented stack: point-of-sale, inventory management, labor scheduling, purchasing, accounting, and delivery platforms rarely speak to each other without manual intervention. Operators and their teams spend hours each week moving data between systems, reconciling information, and completing repetitive administrative tasks — time that could otherwise go toward running the kitchen and the floor. Schwartz and Patel saw this gap firsthand while building xtraCHEF, which helped thousands of operators digitize invoice processing and food cost management before becoming part of Toast's operator platform.
Rather than building another standalone dashboard, Tandem is developing AI agents designed to work across the systems restaurants already have in place. The agents are intended to analyze data from multiple sources, flag items that need attention, automate routine workflows, and take action without requiring operators to log into a separate application. The company describes Tandem as a "multiplayer workspace" where human employees and AI agents collaborate — a framing that positions it less as a reporting tool and more as an active operational layer. For operators specifying back-of-house technology stacks, that distinction matters: Tandem is explicitly designed to layer onto existing infrastructure rather than displace it, which lowers the switching-cost barrier for multi-unit groups evaluating the platform. Those interested in how AI is reshaping back-of-house operations and kitchen management will want to track Tandem's integration roadmap closely.
Operator Expertise Baked In
Schulson, founder of Schulson Collective, joins as Founding Partner with a direct role in shaping product strategy and surfacing the real-world problems operators face daily. His involvement is structural rather than advisory: the company's stated approach is to build with operators rather than for them, embedding kitchen-floor perspective into the product development cycle from the start.
"There is an enormous opportunity for AI in restaurants, but it has to solve the problems operators actually deal with every day," Schulson said. "We're identifying the work that takes time away from our teams and asking a simple question: why can't technology do more of this work for us?"
Tandem sees near-term applications across finance and accounting, purchasing and inventory, labor management, marketing, and day-to-day operational oversight — all areas where back-of-house technology adoption has accelerated significantly in recent years but remained siloed by vendor. The company plans to use its seed capital to expand engineering and product teams, deepen integrations across the restaurant tech ecosystem, and scale deployments with restaurant groups beyond the current pilot cohort. A growing waitlist of multi-unit operators has already expressed interest in deploying the platform.
"The last generation of restaurant technology was about digitizing workflows and putting software into every part of the restaurant," Schwartz said. "We believe the next generation will be about intelligence and action — technology that understands the business and actively helps operators run it."
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
