Seattle-based Meadow AI is emerging from stealth with a multimodal AI platform designed to give restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical operations — and automate the “secret shopper” audits that many chains still conduct manually.
The company has raised a total of $6 million, including a $4.5 million seed round co-led by TenOneTen Ventures and Leadout Ventures, with participation from Wedbush Ventures and Redstick Ventures.
Meadow uses a combination of computer vision, natural language processing, and data from existing systems — including point-of-sale, labor, inventory, video, and audio — to continuously evaluate customer experiences and employee performance. Its AI agent generates recommendations aimed at boosting revenue, improving consistency, and reducing labor costs.
Meadow is initially targeting restaurant and retail chains operating 10 to 300 stores. Its customers range from national restaurant chains to beauty supply stores and arcade-plus-food concepts. Meadow has more than $2.5 million in contracted annual recurring revenue.
The founding team includes CEO Max Jai Sim, who previously co-founded Modus, a Seattle real estate startup acquired by Compass in 2020.
Jai Sim, who also worked at T-Mobile and Peach, said part of the inspiration behind Meadow comes from his family’s experience operating a restaurant business in South Korea.
“It’s an industry that’s essential to our daily lives, yet historically underserved by technology,” he said.
Jai Sim said that during the company’s research, “every restaurant owner and brand told us the same thing: their biggest operational challenges could be solved by an AI that automated secret shopper audits and surface real-time insights.”
Many up-and-coming startups are using AI to help retailers enable real-time visibility into what’s happening at their businesses. Jai Sim said competitors are “building narrow, non-durable features that can be quickly replicated.”
“What they treat as a standalone product is merely a small feature of Meadow’s comprehensive platform,” he said.
Meadow shares some similarities to Ethosphere, another new Seattle startup using AI to analyze retail worker conversations.
Asked about potential privacy concerns, Jai Sim said the company’s customers updated their employment agreements and disclosures to cover the use of Meadow.
Other co-founders at Meadow include COO Abbas Guvenilir, who also co-founded Modus; Scott Liu, former director of engineering at Modus; and CTO Dragos Velicanu, a former engineer at Dave and Manifold.
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