An inside look at our $240M Series D.
This is an inside look at what led to Owner's $240M Series D, led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, at a $2.3B valuation. Our other major investors joined this round, including Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, and Jack Altman. Owner has been life-changing for local business owners and we're excited to serve millions more.
100M+
consumers have used Owner
Top 10%
of startups in both growth and efficiency
Top 0.5%
of startups by revenue
35+
former founders on a lean team stacked with top talent
Executive summary
What you need to know about Owner.
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01
Owner is building Shopify for local business owners, starting with restaurants.
The fate of every business is being determined by its digital presence. People make 77% of their offline buying decisions online. Local owners need high-conversion websites, apps, loyalty programs, and great digital marketing. Compare your local restaurant's website to Domino's or Taco Bell's: you'll see how far they're falling behind. Shopify solved this problem for e-commerce. Owner solves it for local businesses. There are 645,000 independent restaurants in the US spending ~$44B per year on tech, marketing, and payments. Internationally that grows to $105B. Include all brick-and-mortar SMB categories, and the opportunity is $785B.
02
Owner's product works because it's opinionated: an agentic system that delivers profitable sales growth.
Before Owner, restaurants had two options: tools ("build your own website!") or consultants ("I'll run your digital marketing!"). Tools fail: they ask non-technical owners to make too many technical decisions. Consultants cost too much. Owner is an opinionated product that rejects customization. Every customer knows the tradeoff: give up control to get great performance. Because Owner runs every digital property, the agentic system launches thousands of split tests each week and implements changes on its own. Restaurants on Owner grow online traffic by 40% on average within 30 days. Consumers on Owner websites are more than 2x as likely to place an order. And Owner is the #1 rated restaurant tech on G2. This opinionated, agentic system is why customers consistently switch to Owner from competing products.
03
Owner is scaling quickly, and gaining efficiency while scaling.
Owner has doubled ARR every year since inception, and is on track to keep accelerating. It has stayed in the top 10% of both growth and efficiency metrics while building toward "the ultimate SMB business model": the tiny CAC of self-serve tools like Shopify, but with much higher LTVs. Owner acquires customers with free products like the AI Website Grader. Those customers adopt more of the suite and eventually buy Owner POS, which doubles ARPA and drives up retention.
04
Owner will power every kind of local business, everywhere. Its market grows from $44B to $785B in the process.
Phase 1 is every restaurant in the US. Phase 2 is the rest of the world. Restaurant owners abroad are already asking: “I’m in the UK, can I use Owner?” Adding the UK, Canada, the EU, and Australia grows the opportunity from $44B to $105B. Phase 3 is every other local business, including salons, grocers, and spas. That has been the vision from the beginning. The global local SMB market is worth $785B. Owner will pick the order of new verticals the same way it picks countries: by watching which ones pull hardest on its entry-level AI offerings. Owner will ultimately become the AI marketer, tech whiz, and finance expert that every local business owner has always wanted, but could never afford.
05
There's a lot to build, but Owner is at the frontier of AI-driven engineering.
Each model update compresses the roadmap. That’s because Owner has fundamentally changed how it builds software to be at the frontier of AI-driven software engineering. The team’s product velocity will allow Owner to meet growing demand, deliver on its growth frontiers, and compound for years until it serves millions of businesses with tens of billions in spend.
About Owner
A vision bigger
than restaurants.
EU, Australia
SMB around the world
Vision
Build the AI system local business owners need to succeed.
Mission
Arm owners to take on their Goliaths.
Market
Owner’s initial market consists of independent restaurant owners in the US. That’s a ~$44B/year revenue opportunity: 645,000 restaurants spending ~7% of revenue on tech, marketing, and payments. Tech spend is only growing from here, given the expanding role of tech and AI in everyday businesses.
But the founding vision has always been bigger than restaurants. The vision involves serving 15+ other verticals: hair salons, spas, independent grocers. The size of that opportunity is $785B/year. Each needs the same solution that Owner is building for restaurants today. So the Owner team has been building a flexible, transferable platform that makes it easy to launch new verticals.
Insight
Owner’s founding insight is that local business owners don’t need another software tool to figure out. They need a system that drives the outcome automatically: growing profitable sales. That’s possible only if the same agentic solution manages every part of the business’ digital experience.
Why now?
Two big changes have upended the status quo.
One is market-related. The other is technological. Together, they open a new opportunity for Owner to lead the restaurant tech market.
1. Market change
Consumer behavior has shifted online, even when buying from brick-and-mortar businesses. 5 years ago for local businesses, an effective digital presence was a nice-to-have. Succeeding digitally was one potential way to grow your business. But now, an effective digital presence is a must-have.
Local restaurants are the prime example, but the same trend affects every local business. Even though 80%+ of purchases happen offline, consumers research online before buying in-store. This online shift was already happening before 2020, and it isn’t going to shift back. Local business owners are desperate for a solution, and Owner has proven to be that desperately needed solution. Thousands of local business owners now depend on it.
2. Technology change
AI has accelerated Owner’s product development dramatically. It’s now possible to build software in weeks or months after other companies spent years developing it.
AI will help Owner bring forward new growth horizons faster than ever imagined: new products, geographies, and verticals can launch years sooner.
The problem
Technology has been weaponized against local owners.
Local brick-and-mortar business owners are being destroyed by huge corporations. They're using tech and AI to crush and dominate small, independent businesses.
Let's meet an owner from a local taqueria. His name is Mo, and his restaurant is Talkin' Tacos.
Meet Mo.
He started Talkin' Tacos in Florida in 2021. But he was off to a scary start against Goliath-sized corporations.
Taco Bell had huge tech and marketing teams to grow their business.
Mo had a mess of time-consuming tools. That's why he signed up for Owner.
20 years ago, the chile-roasted aroma would’ve been enough to bring in a steady stream of hungry customers. Mo’s great food and service could keep them coming back.
Around 2020, everything changed. The world shifted online. It was already shifting; Covid made it happen even faster. ~77% of restaurant ordering decisions are now made online. People find restaurants online. They buy online. It isn’t going to change back. The same thing is true for other types of local businesses, including salons and gyms.
But restaurants are living in the future. The shift hit them first and hardest because they’re the biggest category of brick-and-mortar businesses. Billions of dollars in capital have been deployed to shift consumer behavior toward high-tech experiences.
In this new world, food and service alone don’t stand a chance. Restaurant owners need to be digitally native experts to make it.
These factors now determine the fate of Mo's business:
- his SEO and online discovery.
- whether he has a mobile app.
- his CRO and conversion rate optimization.
- the quality of his website.
- his digital marketing and loyalty program.
- his first-party online ordering system.
Picture your favorite independent restaurant. Are they equipped in each of those areas? Most aren't.
The new world has been great for Goliath-sized corporations like Taco Bell. They've invested billions in tech that drives online sales, loyalty, and re-ordering like clockwork.
Mo was left behind. He had to fight for his business with nothing but expensive, time-consuming tools. He might as well be fighting with his bare hands.
But fortunately, Mo was keen to try new tech. He went looking for a better way to win, and he became one of Owner’s earliest customers.
Owner's solution
An agentic system that drives profitable, direct sales.
Owner arms local businesses with technology that rivals the Goliaths.
Owner is an agentic system that drives profitable, direct sales. Owner isn’t another tool to figure out. Its approach is done-for-you, not do-it-yourself. It does everything Mo needs to grow his business. He doesn’t have to make decisions about things he’s not an expert at.
Owner is Mo’s full digital stack. It automatically implements the industry’s best practices, researched and tested for years by the Owner team. And the platform keeps improving with proprietary data from billions of transactions and 81.8M consumer users.
Fast forward to today.
Mo credits Owner as his most important partner in growing Talkin' Tacos.
1 → 34
locations in 4.5 years
$1,000,000+
through Owner each month
Owner's online success system
Here’s a summary of Owner’s online success system:
- Website, optimized for SEO and CRO. Owner uses AI to generate websites that not only grow sales, but also look better than any website that most customers have ever had.
- Online ordering system, optimized for reordering and upselling.
- CRM, includes pre-structured marketing automations.
- Mobile app, for restaurant guests.
- Owner dashboard, including web and mobile app.
- Each component of this system improves continually through AI, machine learning, using data from thousands of restaurants in the network.
Owner tips the scales between life and death for Mo and others like him. They see 40%+ growth in their online order volume within their first year. They see a swift surge in sales, and also ongoing growth over time.
When Mo uses Owner, his customers prefer ordering from him. That’s because it satisfies cravings better, costs less, and feels just as easy as ordering from Taco Bell.
Mo's online sales grew so much that he asked Owner to run his in-store sales too. Now he uses Owner POS. Owner powers not only his online sales, but in-person sales too. Online success was the proof. That's what led Mo to make Owner his point of sale and system of record.
Founding product insight
Owner’s key insight is that local business owners don’t need another software tool to figure out. They need an outcome: profitable sales growth.
All small business technology before Owner was built to be maximally customizable. But Owner optimizes for performance, not customizability. There’s a word now for the way Owner has been building software for the past 6 years: agentic. Owner’s product has a scientifically tested opinion on how to drive sales. It executes the best decisions on behalf of its customers.
For example, restaurant owners can change the logo and colors displayed by their Owner-powered website. But they can’t change the placement of CTA buttons, information hierarchy, or order conversion flow. They can’t change the things that impact performance.
The standardized system allows Owner to run thousands of split-tests every single day. It’s impossible to run split-tests on surfaces you don’t control. But since Owner controls the websites and apps, Owner can rapidly iterate to improve them for everyone. Owner learns continuously while it works to deliver the outcome.
Owner’s customers are happy to offload many decisions to Owner, even if it means their website or app looks similar to other restaurants’.
The reason is that it’s helping them drive more sales profitably.
That’s the #1 thing owners care about.
The results
Owner’s opinionated, agentic system yields outstanding results for customers.
- Owner's websites convert 150%+ more visitors into customers, on average.
- Owner grows online traffic by 40% on average within 30 days of launching.
- Mobile app users reorder at 2X the rate of non-app users.
- Owner is the #1 rated restaurant tech software on both Capterra and G2, a leader in 16 different G2 categories.
Over 2,000 customers have switched to Owner from competing platforms. Restaurants experience a permanent surge in conversion rates when they switch:
Average restaurant website conversion rate
Owner has all the best SEO factors built in, with 90+ factors optimized. Its AI features automatically generate pages for relevant, high-volume, high-intent food searches. It also has built-in conversion rate optimization (CRO) best practices. This means owners can just activate this proven structure, not spend thousands of hours figuring out how to optimize it all.
Does every restaurant's experience look the same, since they follow the same structure?
Owner has tested many ways to give restaurants broad brand expression, and offers the options that don’t hinder performance. Those include custom videos, crawling marquee banners, and (soon) AI-generated illustrations.
Underlying patterns are consistent, and that’s a good thing. It means they’ll have a more intuitive user experience, higher conversion rate, and higher return rate. Think of how quickly you can recognize a Shopify store. It feels familiar. You might even feel relieved: you know this site won’t frustrate you. Consumers get the same relief and trust from Owner sites. Owner leaves just enough room for personalization: logo, colors, menu items, story. It’s handled in a deliberate way that doesn’t jeopardize order completion.
The future
Every type of local business. Everywhere.
Owner will power every type of local business, everywhere. This section describes a high-level product roadmap that enables Owner to serve the full TAM.
Phase 1: serve all US SMB restaurants ($44B)
To serve any restaurant in the United States efficiently, Owner needs to enable self-purchase for the full product. Owner has built the capability to self-purchase, and proven it works with 500+ website-only customers. But today, Owner enables self-purchase only for the website, not OSS or POS.
Full self-purchase becomes possible with AI agents that already help restaurant owners launch on Owner without human guidance. There is a path to making every stage of the customer lifecycle agent-first with a natural language interface. This agent-first lifecycle will help unlock the upsell from website to OSS.
Phase 2: serve global restaurants ($105B)
Owner’s domestic work transfers easily to the international restaurant market. The brand already attracts restaurant owners from around the world. On YouTube videos, thousands have left comments like: "I’m in the UK, can I use Owner?" With international expansion (UK, CAN, EU, AUS) the revenue opportunity grows from $44B to $105B.
Canadian restaurant owners are already using the Grader. As more people use the Grader in each country, the data will help determine the sequence to invest in compliance and currency support.
Phase 3: serve global SMBs ($785B)
The Owner vision has always been bigger than restaurants.
It started with a local dog grooming business owned by Adam’s mom. Having the right tech, the first version of Owner, transformed it from struggling to successful.
Owner will create the same transformation for every other local business owner.
Owner started by pursuing independent restaurant owners because the market was big enough. Restaurants could provide the revenue, scale, data, and resources to serve as the springboard for the big vision.
Building in the restaurant vertical has played out exactly as predicted. Owner is already seeing strong signals of demand from other verticals. Future verticals include salons, grocers, and spas.
The Owner system would be extremely useful to each of those business types, and they already want it. The same dynamics that apply to restaurants apply to them, too. The fates of these offline businesses are being determined by their online presence. They all face the same challenge with existing software, which is that it becomes a cluster of tools to figure out. They all need an agentic system to deliver the outcome of profitable growth.
That’s why the Owner team has been building a flexible, transferable platform that makes it easy to launch new verticals.
Most of the system could benefit hair salons, independent grocers, or spas. Those include the AI Grader and AI Website Generator. These aren’t hard-coded to restaurants. Diagnosing online problems works across verticals: finding the keywords that drive customers, checking rankings, reviewing site speed, and tracking review velocity. Then, it’s easy enough to generate a website that addresses all of the challenges the AI found.
Owner will pursue new verticals sequentially. The sequence will be based on the market pull to free and self-serve products. Today, Owner is building AI to personalize and optimize the system for each business type, based on the data it collects. Over time, Owner will supply an agentic system to all local business owners.
This is how Owner will become the company all local business owners rely on to succeed in the future. Every local business owner dreams of being able to hire a marketing leader, technology leader, and finance leader. None of them can afford it. But they’ll all be able to afford the Owner app, which will start to meet those needs. The platform, over time, will evolve to be their AI marketer, tech whiz, and finance expert. It will be trained on the data and best practices of thousands of that exact business type.
Owner will give tens of millions of local business owners the ultimate system to take on the large corporate Goliaths.
GTM
Owner’s GTM approach drives best-in-class efficiency metrics
Prospects close at industry-leading rates because they’re pre-sold on trust and value. Owner builds trust and delivers value in 2 main ways: (1) Media, and (2) the AI Grader and AI Website Generator.
1. Media
Owner has the most trusted brand in restaurant tech. It all starts with great media. Owner produces the world’s best business education content, designed for restaurant owners. Owner distributes the content via both organic and paid media, as the top authority in restaurant marketing.
Owner’s media presence was already booming at Series C. But in October 2025, Owner recruited Michael Lim, the creative director who helped scale media brands for Mr. Beast and Alex and Leila Hormozi. He is Owner’s VP of Media and Chief of Staff to the CEO.
- In 2022, Owner had just 6K followers, educating restaurant owners on ways to grow their business. In August 2026, its audience is now ~389K, with the Facebook audience growing ~6x since October 2025.
- Owner invested early in its brand. The goal was to avoid renting an audience to scale. This momentum compounded.
There’s still tremendous room for growth here. Nobody else has taken the opportunity to build a movement or community in this space. Yet, it’s the largest category of similar small business owners in the world.
2. AI Grader and Website Generator
The AI Grader deepens trust by delivering free value. It diagnoses restaurant owners’ online problems, educates them on how to improve, and shows them a preview of a better world. Owner launched the Grader in 2024. Since the Series C, 6x more distinct restaurant owners have unlocked their personalized AI Grader report.
Over 90% of customers now get value from the Grader and Website Generator before they buy. This key step in the customer journey leads to Owner’s ever-improving sales efficiency.
Exceptional ARPA for the SMB sector
Owner commands a high ARPA because it makes a clear promise: to grow sales.
When customers sign up, they believe that Owner will grow their sales sufficiently to exceed the $500/month that they pay for the product. Owner then keeps that promise. On average, customers see ~40% growth in 1st party online orders after 1 year of working with Owner.
When a customers' restaurants sales volume grows or when they add new locations, their payments volume increases. It flows through Owner and grows Owner’s revenue.
What network effects does Owner have?
For restaurants: Owner uses data to improve performance across every restaurant in the network. The more consumers use Owner-powered websites and apps, the more Owner can optimize every part of their online experience. Owner runs thousands of split tests every month. When it validates a better approach across a batch of restaurants, it can propagate that improvement.
For guests: Ordering from any Owner-powered restaurant makes it easier to order from any other restaurant in the network. Owner has built a checkout experience equivalent to Shopify’s Shop Pay. Owner can recognize a user from any past Owner transaction. From there, it automatically fills in the user’s details at checkout. This reduces any friction associated with ordering from another restaurant in the Owner network.
Competition
More than 10,000 customers will switch to Owner this year.
They're looking for profitable sales growth, and the competitor doesn't provide it. Owner does.
Owner isn’t a good fit for restaurant owners who care more about creative control than performance. Those customers are best served by consultants. Owner’s customers care more about performance than creative control. They don’t want to have to fiddle with customizations. They want the work done for them. That’s what Owner does.
Owner has 2 advantages compared to competitors: better GTM, and better Product.
Better GTM
It’s easy and risk-free to start using Owner. Customers get free value from Owner’s AI tools before buying anything. Owner doesn’t require a huge upfront investment or a long-term contract. From there, it’s easy for customers to expand. Customers trust Owner after it has proven that it can grow their sales for free. That trust continues to grow as they use more of Owner’s products.
Better product
Competitors took their products in a different direction, favoring customization over performance. Restaurant owners see “yet another tool to figure out.”
Business owners want the ultimate system for profitable growth, not a box of tools to figure out. The customer doesn’t want to have to fiddle with customizations. They want the work done for them. That’s what Owner does.
One piece of evidence for this: customers are MORE likely to buy Owner if they’re using a competitor, versus not having any solution in place, because they see how Owner is superior.
Likelihood of signing up for Owner, by current platform
Win rate after demo. Owner wins more often against every incumbent than it does on average.
Team
Built by more than 35 former founders.
Owner has assembled the right team to build the most important company in small business software.
Adam Guild — Co-founder, CEO. Built projects reaching 10,000,000+ users as a teen. Thiel Fellow.
Dean Bloembergen — Co-founder, CTO. CTO of restaurant tech startup Marble (YC S18).
Rob Lehman — President and COO. Led ops and revenue at Compass from $0 to $6B.
Matt Rosenberg — Chief Revenue Officer. Compass through IPO; scaled companies through 3 IPOs.
Quenton Cook — Chief Product Officer. Led Remind as SVP of Product, then CEO, 30M MAUs.
Will Hauser — Chief Financial Officer. First Head of Finance at DoorDash, Seed through Series C.
Wyatt Ozmore — Chief Marketing Officer. Scaled Houzz Pro.
Darrin Henein — Chief Design Officer. Led design at Shopify: POS, Growth, and Marketing.
Joel Baroody — Chief Talent Officer. Talent leader at Brex and Uber.
Tom O'Brien — General Counsel. Head of Product Legal at Salesforce.
Max Presman — VP of Engineering. Engineering leader at DoorDash and Rippling.
Lauren Pollini — VP of People. Scaled One Medical from the founding team to 2,000+.
Founder DNA
The Owner team is stacked with founder DNA. Many people at Owner are former founders, several of them venture-backed. They are mostly in IC roles at Owner. Owner is proud to have them aboard, operating with maximum intensity and innovation. For example:
Will Schreiber — prev CEO of Bottle.com, now GM PLG
Alex Patin — Series A founder CTO, now Engineer
Jay Gokhale — YC founder, now Engineer
Daniel Ternyak — serial founder and Thiel Fellow, now Head of AI Agents
Matt Tengtrakool — founder, now SWE
Jonathan Shenkman — prev founder of Gibbs Energy, now VP of Bizops
Anusha Rajan — prev founder CTO of Roar, now Eng Manager
Adam Whitcroft — Apple-featured indie developer, Principal Designer at Shopify, now Design
Danial Asif — early DoorDash, then YC founder, now Eng Manager
Frankie Liu — early DoorDash, then YC founder, now Staff SWE. Plus 25 more.
Board of Directors
Jack Altman — General Partner at Benchmark. Co-founder and CEO at Lattice to $100M+ ARR.
Jason Lemkin — Managing Partner at SaaStr Fund. Built EchoSign, sold to Adobe.
Alex Bard — Managing Director at Redpoint. 4x founder CEO. Former restaurant owner.
Shalini Rao — Head of Headline Growth. Led the Toast Series C, the Asana and Gusto Series D.
Harris Pollack — VP, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. Led Fieldguide Series C, and co-led Harvey Series G extension.
Alex Kurland — General Partner at Meritech. Led the DoorDash Series B, Clay B and C, Carta D.- Adam Guild — Co-founder and CEO at Owner.
Why we build
Local business owners are heroes to us. They risk everything to chase their dreams. They create jobs, give unique flavors to their neighborhoods, and remind us that it's possible to rise from entry-level worker to business owner, as 70% of restaurant owners do.
But local business owners are on a path to extinction. Just 20 years ago, 60% of the restaurant world belonged to independent owners. Today that number is 40% and dropping by the year. This is not a world we want to live in.
We build because we believe a world with more local businesses is a better world. We build because the chips are stacked against them, and we're on their side. We build to give the superpowers of large corporations to local businesses.
PS from our CEO
The job's not finished.
Adam Guild, Co-founder and CEO at Owner
The world is racing to build AI to replace people's jobs. Owner is building AI for a different purpose: to do the jobs for small business owners they've never been able to afford.
Owner already powers more locations than either Domino's or Taco Bell, and has been used by 100M+ consumers. We use our scale and data to ensure small business owners win. We build AI to even the odds for customers no one else is building for. This year alone, local businesses will drive $1B in sales using Owner. These sales will tip the scale between growth and closure for some.
But even as we route $1B toward local restaurant owners, the job's not finished.
About Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives: Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) is one of the leading investors in alternatives globally, with over $706 billion in assets and more than 30 years of experience. The business invests in the full spectrum of alternatives including private equity, growth equity, venture capital, private credit, real estate, infrastructure, sustainability, and hedge funds. Clients access these solutions through direct strategies, customized partnerships, and open-architecture programs. The business is driven by a focus on partnership and shared success with its clients, seeking to deliver long-term investment performance drawing on its global network and deep expertise across industries and markets. The alternative investments platform is part of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, which delivers investment and advisory services across public and private markets for the world’s leading institutions, financial advisors and individuals. Goldman Sachs has approximately $4.0 trillion in assets under supervision globally as of June 30, 2026. Since 2003, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives has invested over $17 billion in companies led by visionary founders and CEOs. The team focuses on investments in growth stage and technology-driven companies spanning multiple industries, including enterprise technology, financial technology, consumer and healthcare.
This memo has been adapted for public viewing by sanitizing proprietary details and data.
The easiest way to grow your restaurant online.
