An inside look at our $120M Series C, co-led by Meritech and Headline.

Executive Summary

1. Owner is building Shopify for local business owners, starting with restaurant owners.

The fate of every business is being determined by its online presence. Consumers make their offline buying decisions online. That’s a problem for local business owners. They need high-conversion websites, loyalty programs, and great digital marketing. Compare your local restaurants’ websites to Domino’s or Sweetgreen: you’ll see just how far they’re falling behind. Shopify solved this problem for e-commerce businesses. Owner is solving it for local businesses, starting with restaurants. Thousands of restaurant owners are using Owner to create a future where small business owners survive and thrive.

2. Owner is the ultimate weapon for owners to take on their Goliaths. 

Owner isn’t another tool to figure out. It’s an opinionated system that works out of the box to own the outcome of 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 require non-technical business owners to make too many technical decisions. Consultants also fail: business owners can’t afford their high costs. Owner succeeds because it isn’t another tool to figure out. Owner is an opinionated product that rejects customization. It delivers the outcome of profitable sales growth, rather than being a tool in the workflow. Since every digital property is consistent and controlled by Owner, the platform runs millions of split tests every week. It automatically optimizes every part of the system.

3. The product works, and Owner is scaling quickly.

Guests on Owner websites are more than 2x as likely to place an order. Restaurants on the Owner platform grow their traffic by 30% on average within 30 days. Owner is the #1 rated restaurant tech software on both G2 and Capterra. Owner has multiplied ARR every year since inception, tracking to continue accelerating.

4. Owner is a superpower for its customers faced with uncertainty.

Restaurant owners feel scared of economic forces. Those include inflation, tariffs, and minimum wage hikes. Owner is a source of stability amid the instability. Adopting Owner increases their odds of surviving and growing, despite the approaching threats. The macroeconomic uncertainty is helping Owner grow.

5. Owner is building the ultimate team to forge the most important company in small business software.

As you’ll see in the Team section, the Owner team is already formidable. For one, it’s stacked with founder DNA: more than 25 team members are former founders! Many have raised millions, led startups as CEOs, and are now individual contributors at Owner. Others are alumni of highly relevant startups including Shopify and DoorDash. Owner is proud to have them onboard, operating with unrivaled intensity and innovation.

About Owner

The Problem

Local brick-and-mortar business owners are being destroyed by Goliath-sized corporations. Technology has been weaponized to crush and replace them. 

Imagine a local pizzeria. The owner’s name is Sarkis. His pizzeria is called Township Line Pizza. 

20 years ago, the wood-fired aroma was enough to bring in a steady stream of hungry customers. Sarkis’ great food and service kept guests coming back. 

Around 2020, everything changed. The world was already shifting online, but COVID-19 accelerated the transition. Today, the majority of consumers find restaurants online, evaluate restaurants online, and order food online. This trend is here to stay; it is not going to change back.

In this new world, aromas and friendly service don’t stand a chance. 

The new world has been great for Goliath-sized corporations like Domino’s. Domino’s has invested billions in tech that drives online sales, loyalty, and re-ordering like clockwork. 

Domino’s is growing while Sarkis struggles. Nobody has built tech to drive his online sales like clockwork. Sarkis is fighting for his business with nothing but time-consuming, expensive point solutions. 

He might as well be fighting with his bare hands.

Owner’s Solution

With Owner, Sarkis stands armed to succeed in 2025.

Owner arms Sarkis with technology that rivals the Goliath’s.

Importantly — Owner is a proven system that drives profitable, direct sales. Owner isn’t another tool to figure out. It’s a complete system that works automatically out of the box. It does everything Sarkis needs to grow his business. He doesn’t have to make decisions about things he's not an expert at.

Owner is Sarkis’ digital stack. It automatically executes the industry’s best practices (researched and tested for years by the Owner team). Here’s a summary of Owner’s platform:

Owner tips the scales between life and death for Sarkis and others like him. They see 30%+ growth in their online order volume within their first year. They see a swift surge in sales, and also ongoing growth over time.

When Sarkis 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 Domino’s.

Market Size

Owner’s initial market consists of independent restaurant owners in the US. That’s a $21B+/year revenue opportunity: 600,000 restaurants at $35,000/year. $35K is what they spend on tech and marketing. 

But the founding vision has always stretched beyond restaurants. The vision involves championing 15+ other types of local businesses. Those will include hair salons, independent grocers, gyms, dog groomers, spas, and auto shops. They all need the same solution that Owner is building for restaurants today. So the Owner team has been building with transferability in mind.

Why is now the time for a restaurant tech company to get really big?

1. Consumer behavior shift.

‍77% of restaurant buying decisions are now happening online. Online ordering has boomed. Both pickup & delivery have risen to prominence (versus dine-in). Takeout is now all-important to restaurant success. Succeeding online has shifted from “nice to have” to “must have.” Restaurant owners are desperate for a solution.

2. Foundation models.

AI enables small business owners to operate with superpowers once exclusive to corporations.

3. APIs have recently made it possible to build compound startups.

Stripe, Twilio, and Mailgun enable Owner to build non-core functionalities using existing models. They allow Owner to achieve a more powerful product. Meanwhile, competitors have to build everything themselves. They’re locked into outdated systems that force them to do that.

4. Extreme economic headwinds are pushing local businesses to adopt Owner.

Minimum wage hikes are compelling restaurants to reduce labor costs. Inflation has increased food costs. Delivery app fees slash into restaurants’ margins. All of these pressures raise the stakes related to direct online ordering. 

5. Customers’ expectations have risen when it comes to digital experience.

Starbucks gets 60% of its morning orders on the Starbucks app. Customers are acclimated to that smooth, snappy experience. People will gravitate towards businesses that offer personalization, loyalty and world-class mobile experience.

Product

Owner’s founding product insight is that local business owners don’t need another software tool to figure out. They need a system that produces the outcome they’re after: growing sales profitably. This is why the Owner product is extremely opinionated. 

All small business software before Owner was built to be maximally customizable. But Owner is optimizing for giving customers performance, not customizability. 

For example, restaurant owners can upload their logos and brand colors into the Owner website generator. But they can’t change the placement of CTA buttons, information hierarchy, or order conversion flow. They can’t change the things that dictate performance. 

The universal, standardized web templates allow Owner to run thousands of split-tests every single day. It’s impossible to run split-tests on sites you don’t control. But since Owner controls the websites, Owner can rapidly iterate to improve everyone’s websites.

Owner’s customers are delighted to offload many decisions to Owner with thousands of micro-decisions about their online presence. It doesn’t bother them if their website resembles another restaurant that also uses Owner — because they see their sales growing. That’s the #1 thing owners care about.

Owner’s extreme opinionation delivers big victories for customers.

• Owner’s websites convert 100% more visitors into customers, on average.
• Owner grows SEO traffic by 30% within just 28 days of launching.
• The addition of a mobile app creates a customer cohort with 2x the reorder rate of the average customer.
• The average Owner customer grows their direct online revenue more than 30% in the first year, and every year after that. This is why Owner is the fastest-growing company in restaurant tech.
• Owner is the #1 rated restaurant tech software on both Capterra and G2. Owner is a leader / award winner in 16 different G2 categories. Those include: most likely to recommend, best support, best results, best relationship, and best usability.
• Restaurants experience a permanent surge in conversion rates when they switch to Owner.

The Owner system 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 them.

Does this mean every restaurant’s experience looks similar, since it’s following the same structure?

Yes, 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 you can recognize, within seconds, that you’re on a Shopify store. It feels familiar. You might even feel relieved: you know it won’t be a pain to use this website. You feel more trust in using the website. 

People get the same relief and trust from Owner sites. Owner leaves just enough room for personalization: logo, colors, specific menu items, story. It’s handled in a deliberate way that doesn’t jeopardize the chance of order completion.

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The Next Evolution: AI Agents for Local Businesses

Owner has a unique data advantage that sets it up perfectly to build AI agents.

Owner has already collected and organized a massive amount of data. Owner's data spans thousands of restaurants, millions of menu items, cuisine specifics, SEO performance, ordering patterns, transaction patterns, and tens of millions of people using the product.

Also, Owner’s data has already been structured into a highly prescriptive battle plan for local restaurants. Owner knows the single best way to grow restaurant sales. The battle plan includes the correct answers for many variables. 

Owner already implements many components of the battle plan through its opinionated system. AI already fights part of the battle.

For example, Owner applies visual AI to optimize food images, because the data shows that vibrant pictures lead to 30% more sales:

AI agents will make it even easier to execute the battle plan to secure profitable growth. For example, AI agents will enable hyper-personalized recommendations for menu items and promotions. These will produce a significant boost to restaurants’ revenue. 

Over time, AI agents will be able to initiate and run pricing experiments. They’ll also be able to automatically handle customer questions and optimize ordering processes. 

AI agents will be the ultimate extension of Owner’s opinionated product. 

Owner’s customer-facing term for AI agents is “AI Executives.” 

Every restaurant owner dreams of being able to hire a CTO and CMO. But they’d never be able to afford that. Until now. In 2025, Owner is launching the first AI executives for restaurants. They’ll be able to hire these employees to execute the best practices in marketing and tech.

Like every restaurant owner’s dream employee, the AI CMO will be a digital marketing expert. She’ll be trained on how to drive restaurant growth, and will never call in sick. She will communicate with owners via chat interface.

For example:

• Proactive: “Memorial Day is in 7 days! Activate these campaigns? Click here to preview.”
• Reportive: “Same-store sales are up 7% this month, largely driven by SEO. Boom!”
• Reactive [in response to a message from the owner]: “Heard you’re out of avocados! I’ll disable the guac and avocado add-ons until we restock tomorrow.”

Why would restaurant owners want an AI CFO, CMO, and CTO?

They want solutions to the problems they encounter day to day. AI agents will be able to find many of those solutions within seconds. They’ll even be able to anticipate many of the problems.

Here are some examples.

AI CFO:

Restaurant owners endlessly ask: “How do I reduce food cost and labor cost, without hurting quality?” For food, the solution requires some calculations, including contribution margin. For labor, it requires finding out the benchmarks of similar restaurants. Restaurant owners don’t do these things well on their own. But the AI CFO will have access to all of their data, as well as all the benchmark data. It will be able to perform these real-time calculations and advise the owner accordingly.

AI CMO:

Restaurant owners want to share news and stories with their customers. But they struggle to find the words. Many speak English as a second language. Now, they’ll be able to ask the CMO to deliver the news. It will write professional copy within seconds. The AI CMO will also be able to anticipate opportunities to increase sales, such as upcoming holidays. It will proactively draft campaigns to pursue those opportunities.

AI CTO:

The best practices of SEO and CRO are always shifting. It takes technical know-how to monitor the technical landscape and make the relevant updates. But now, the AI CTO will be able to constantly update the restaurant app’s user experience and restaurant’s web user experience. It will also be able to answer more tech-support related questions automatically. For example, an owner might ask: “How do I update my online hours to reflect our new breakfast menu?” The AI CTO would respond: “I updated it on our website and every online directory for us. This looks like it could lead to a 21% jump in business, based on search volumes for that keyword!”

The AI executives will have a natural-language interface. The interface will start with text chat. Eventually, it will be possible to call an AI executive on the phone.

AI agents are also central to our mission—to arm owners to take on their Goliaths.

Restaurant owners aren’t the only ones who want AI executives. Almost every local business owner wants them too.

Every local business owner needs this tech upgrade. They all need to replace their point solutions—including Wix and Mailchimp. They all need a proven system that grows sales profitably for them. Owner will give those other local business owners their very own AI CTO, CMO, and COO to transform their businesses. 

More details on this in the section on Going Horizontal.

GTM

Owner is the first team to start a movement around restaurant survival and success. As it turns out, this is the largest category of similar small business owners in the world. They desperately needed a unified movement.

Owner is now the leading authority in restaurant growth. Owner produces the world’s best business education content designed for restaurant owners. Owner distributes the content via both organic and paid media. 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.

Customers find Owner’s content by searching for how best to grow their restaurant profitably, then explore Owner products. They already have some trust in Owner because of the free content. And Owner makes it easy to try the products.

More than 90% of Owner’s account executives ramp to quota within 3 months. That’s because incoming customers are already well informed about Owner. And Owner has the highest customer support satisfaction levels in the industry.

Also, channel partnerships are starting to accelerate. Owner has secured multiple distribution partnerships thanks to VP Partnerships Tina Glickman. She spent the last 5 years running restaurant tech partnerships. 

Net Churn and Net Revenue Retention

Net Revenue Retention is one of the most important metrics for Owner’s growth. Because Owner serves SMBs, Owner has a higher rate of logo churn than an enterprise SaaS company that serves large corporations. But Owner is counteracting logo churn with expansion revenue from the customers that succeed.

For example, when our customers' restaurants sales volume grows or when they add new locations, their payments volume increases, this flows through Owner and grows Owner’s revenue.

Logo churn is inevitable for businesses that serve SMBs. For example, a large portion of Owner’s churn in January 2025 was due to restaurant closures. Despite these dynamics, Owner already has best-in-class retention metrics for the restaurant technology category.

As the Owner product gets better and better at driving success for restaurants, our ability to counteract churn with expansion revenue will get even better.

Competition

More than 1,000 customers have switched to Owner from competing products. They switched because they were looking for profitable sales growth, but the competitors didn’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 BentoBox, Squarespace, or consultants. Owner also isn’t a good fit for those who just want to get the word out about their restaurant. They are best served by DoorDash and Uber Eats.

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.

They’re 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.

Do customers use Toast, Square, or Clover in addition to Owner?

Yes. Owner integrates with Toast, Square, and Clover. In fact, hundreds of Owner’s customers use these systems in addition to Owner.

These POS systems are designed for operational efficiency within the restaurant. They unify front of house and back of house. Owner then integrates with them to provide a streamlined system for growing online sales.

As a result, restaurant owners can get the best of both worlds: a system for operational efficiency, paired with a system for profitable sales growth.

What are competitors missing?

There are two reasons why Owner is seeing success against its competition. 

1. Competitors took their products in a different direction—favoring customization. Restaurant owners see “yet another tool to figure out.” 
2. Competitors lock customers into long-term contracts, then use unnecessarily aggressive tactics during collections. This feels unfair to restaurant owners who are struggling, or feel like they haven't gotten any value. Restaurants are hard enough without competitors collecting their fees by any means necessary. We’ve heard stories of them using ACH debits, collection agencies, and other extreme means to collect. Restaurant owners HATE this.

In contrast, Owner doesn’t lock customers into long-term contracts. Owner offers month-to-month billing only, because we insist on earning restaurant owner’s business every month. It’s the ultimate incentive alignment.

Interestingly, another competitor category that Owner frequently replaces is marketing consultants. Restaurant owners often feel that their software stack is complicated to manage. So they try to hire consultants to do SEO, website building, and more. They spend over $1,000 a month on average on consultants. But Owner’s AI replaces the work of a consultant. Owner is cheaper, more effective, and more measurable than hiring a consultant. 

Going Horizontal

How will Owner ultimately arm every other type of brick-and-mortar business against every other Goliath?

The Owner vision has always stretched beyond restaurants.

It started with a local dog grooming business owned by Adam’s mom. She felt much like Sarkis: defenseless against her own Goliath, which was Petco. But she secured victory after being armed with the first version of Owner.

Owner aims to secure that same victory for every local business owner.

Owner started by pursuing independent restaurant owners because the field was big enough. Restaurants could provide the revenue, scale, data, and resources to serve as the proving ground for the big vision.

The story has unfolded exactly as written. Owner is already seeing strong signals of demand from other verticals, like salons, pet care, spas, gyms, florists, and auto shops. Owner will pursue them sequentially based on market pull.

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. 

How good is the website, mobile app, SEO, digital marketing, online pick-up/delivery of your local florist, indie grocer, or salon?

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 arm all local business owners with their very own AI CTO, CMO, and CFO. 

This is how Owner will become the company all local business owners rely on to win in the future ahead. Every local business owner dreams of being able to hire a marketing leader, technology leader, and finance leader. None of them can afford it. So the platform, over time, will evolve to be their AI CMO, CTO, and CFO. 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 system to take on the large corporate Goliaths. 

By strengthening millions of local businesses, Owner will grow into a mighty enterprise.