Indian American tech entrepreneur Bhavik Patel has teamed up again with xtraCHEF co-founder Andrew Schwartz to launch Tandem, an AI company focused on transforming how restaurants operate.
Noted chef and restaurateur Michael Schulson has joined the company as a Founding Partner, bringing decades of restaurant operating experience directly into Tandem’s product strategy and development.
Schwartz and Patel previously built restaurant technology company xtraCHEF, which was acquired by Toast. The pair are now back with a new thesis: AI creates an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how technology supports restaurant operators and their teams.
Philadelphia-based Tandem has also closed an initial seed financing to accelerate product development, expand its team and support its early restaurant deployments. The company is already working with operators across 100 restaurant locations through its pilot program, with a growing waitlist of additional restaurant groups interested in deploying the platform.
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Rather than adding another dashboard or standalone application for restaurant teams to manage, Tandem is building AI agents designed to work across the systems restaurants already use. These agents can help operators analyze information, identify what requires attention, automate repetitive workflows and take action across the business. Tandem will also act as a multiplayer workspace for the human employees to communicate with their agentic co workers.
“Restaurants don’t need another system to log into or another dashboard to manage,” said Schwartz, Co-Founder and CEO of Tandem. “We believe AI gives us the opportunity to build technology that actually works alongside the operator — understanding what’s happening across the business, handling repetitive work and helping teams take action.”
As Co-Founder and CPO/CTO, Patel leads Tandem’s technology, AI and engineering strategy. Patel previously served as CTO and Co-Founder of xtraCHEF, where he helped build the technology platform that ultimately became part of Toast following the company’s acquisition.
“AI gives us the ability to build systems that can understand context, reason across multiple sources of information and help execute work,” said Patel. “Our focus at Tandem is turning those capabilities into reliable, practical products that solve real problems for restaurant operators.”
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Joining Schwartz and Patel as a Founding Partner is Schulson, founder of Schulson Collective, who brings decades of hands-on experience building and operating successful restaurant concepts and will work closely with Tandem on product strategy, operator needs and the real-world application of AI inside restaurants.
Schulson’s involvement reflects a core part of Tandem’s approach: build with restaurant operators, not simply for them. Together, Schwartz, Patel and Schulson bring a combination of restaurant technology, product development, AI expertise and hands-on restaurant operating experience to Tandem.
The company sees applications for AI across nearly every part of restaurant operations — from finance and accounting to labor, purchasing, inventory, marketing, guest engagement and day-to-day operational management.
Tandem’s strategy is to introduce agents around specific, high-value workflows and increasingly connect those capabilities across the restaurant organization.
Tandem is also developing integrations across the restaurant technology ecosystem, allowing its agents to work with the systems operators already rely on rather than requiring restaurants to replace their existing technology stack.