How Loop Is Building A Virtual Restaurant Operating System

According to Bloomberg Second Measure, as of May 2022, sales for meal delivery services grew 8% year-over-year collectively. Further, US food delivery as of April 2020 was dominated by major delivery aggregators including Doordash (45%), Grubhub (23%), Uber Eats (22%) and Postmates (8%). As US restaurants constantly struggle to attract new customers, they must adopt digital ordering and other tools of convenience based on consumer behavior. Vinod Pachipulusu, Sundar Annamalai and Anand Tummuluru quit their jobs at large tech companies to develop a novel tool with their startup called Loop. Loop fully automates restaurant backend operations, assisting restaurant owners to find the right product-market fit faster so they can focus on what they're good at cooking phenomenal food and providing excellent service to customers.

We’ll start with Sundar. Tell us a bit about yourself…

I graduated from IIT Madras with a bachelor's in computer science. I interned in Google Mountain View, building features for Google Assistant. After that, I spent 4 years at Uber building their AI engine for ETAs. I spent 9 months at Sharechat leading the Recommendation System team for Moj helping with feed ranking. Moj is the leading Indian short video similar to TikTok with over 100 million monthly active users. About a month ago, I started LoopKitchen with a couple of my ex-colleagues to build something around data + intelligence for restaurants.

Where did this passion for code come from? What's your most interesting project?

I was really interested in coding from the beginning. I participated and did well in several coding competitions since school. I represented India in the ACM ICPC World Finals which is the Olympics of programming. I was also a judge and a trainer in selecting the Indian team for the International Olympiad of Informatics which is the largest international coding competition in school.

Why, after having a successful career at one of the largest tech companies in the US, did you decide to strike out on your own as a CTO for this startup?

I was one of the first students at my college to intern at Google Mountain View. I was really captivated by the entrepreneurial culture of the Valley and have always wanted to start a company in the Valley ever since. I was the first and only person in 2017 to be hired directly by Uber for the Silicon Valley office in campus placements. I was always brainstorming ideas with friends to start up.

What are the biggest challenges you have when it comes to solving such problems?

Building a great team is one of the most important components of building a long-lasting company. To get great people excited about your mission and to find what they are looking for.

Who are your key investors and how do they fit into your ecosystem?

Our lead investor is Afore Capital - they have invested in several players in the restaurant space and are seasoned operators/investors in the valley

What books would you recommend to other aspiring founders?

Sundar: I personally found Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger and Shoe dog by Phil knight. One of the most astonishing facts for me was how the two iconic CEOs had drastically different career trajectories.

Great. Vinod, tell us a bit about yourself, more about your profession and personal interests.

Vinod: I graduated from BITS Pilani and joined Musigma as a data scientist. After that I spent 7 years at Google as Senior Manager, leading Operations for AI recommendations in Google Search. Built many 0-to-1 teams matching the industry standard to handle classic challenges with online safety & trust, to prevent bad behavior and bad actors. Personally, I love food, I am passionate about that craft. Recently we started Loop Kitchen along with my friends focusing on becoming the enterprise back office software for virtual kitchens extendable into digital ordering heavy B&M chains. Before that Anand and I remotely ran a cloud kitchen to a $100k revenue in India which laid the foundation.

You were the owner of a restaurant. What lessons did you take from that part of your career?

Vinod: Running a restaurant is extremely difficult. Roughly half, if not more, die in their first year because the margins in the industry are razor thin. There is a willingness to pay for software that layers on existing vendors to increase digital ordering and this market is underserved in back office software that enables data and smart workflows.

How do you know your company would solve these problems? / How are you addressing the needs of US restaurants, specifically?

Vinod: This will be achieved through a combination of deploying state-of-the-art operational runbooks, experimenting with driven optimizations, making deeply data-driven decisions and bringing focus to metrics and behaviors that enable the restaurant to be successful at various levels of the stack. Restaurants with at least 20% or more than $10,000 of their revenue coming through online channels and don’t have a large back office to manage listings are our target. There are 500k restaurants in the US, including mom-and-pop shops and small chains that don’t have the bandwidth or capital to invest in a technology team or hire an additional manager

Tell us how you all (co-founders) met?

Vinod: Anand is my high school friend and we ran a cloud kitchen in India. Sundar is my roommate in the US for the last 2 years, Sundar and Anand are colleagues at Uber. We used to go for hikes, and road trips, at a personal level, we know about each other.

Anand, what domain expertise do you have?

Anand: Vinod and I built a zero to 1 cloud kitchen remotely during the pandemic. Sundar wrote several large ML and DL models. Sundar and I ran 10s of user and marketplace A/Bs at Uber.