Spoon is an AI-native back-office platform built by restaurant operators for restaurant operators.
How we do it
We start with Toast
Spoon securely reads near-real-time sales, labor, and menu data from Toast and transforms it into operational insights, alerts, and recommended actions designed to support decisions within existing workflows, where appropriate.
Who Spoon is for
- Multi-unit and growing restaurant operators
- Teams looking for clearer decisions without changing their core systems
- Restaurants looking to replace their POS
- Payment processors or guest-facing ordering platforms
What we do
We focus on decision intelligence and operational orchestration powered by Toast data.
Cost + Pricing Intelligence
Design plate builds, calculate true item costs using vendor inputs, model pricing for target margins, and approved pricing updates synced to Toast
Sales + Inventory Tracking
Read sales data from Toast, update theoretical inventory, compare against physical inventory audits to identify variance and waste
Sales + Margin Alerts
Continuously monitor changing vendor costs against Toast sales data, track margin targets, and flag when price or menu action may be required
Sales Forecast + Staffing Planning
Use up-to-date Toast sales data to forecast demand, plan staffing needs across locations, and support schedule planning workflows
Labor + Payroll Readiness
Capture clock-in and clock-out from Toast, verify and approve hours, and integrate with your payroll systems and banking partners
Our integration Principles
Toast-first
Toast remains the system of record for sales, menus, labor, and payments
Read-before-write
Spoon prioritizes read-only access, with explicit user approval for any write actions
No payment handling
Spoon does not touch payments, guest data, or cardholder data
Built for scale
Designed to meet enterprise-grade reliability and security expectations
Built by restaurant operators and enterprices software leaders
Spoon is built by a team that understands both the operational realities of running restaurants and the technical responsibility of integrating with mission-critical platforms like Toast.
Mason H. Ayer
Co-Founder and CEO
Mason is the CEO of Kerbey Lane Cafe, a 10-unit Austin restaurant group where he has led large-scale operational, financial, and technological transformation. As a long-time operator of Toast-powered restaurants, Mason brings deep domain expertise, a track record of operational excellence, and firsthand insight into the needs of multi-unit operators. Spoon was born directly from his experience modernizing Kerbey Lane’s systems and his belief that the industry deserves a modern, AI-native platform designed by operators for operators.
Pradeep Nalluri
Co-Founder
Pradeep Nalluri is an investor, entrepreneur, and former technology CEO with three successful exits. As his most recent role, he served as CEO of Beam, a $100M holding company and subsidiary of Tiny. Leading seven creative agencies, he drove creative solutions for prestigious brands including Adidas, Amazon Music, Apple, Brand Jordan, Calvin Klein, Netflix, pgLang, Polaroid, Prada, Self-Portrait, and Spotify. Before Beam, he was the President and CEO of Mutual Mobile, an award winning digital services business, scaling it to 400 employees and $50M in revenue before selling to Grid Dynamics, a NASDAQ-listed company. He holds a degree in Computer Science.
Aditya Ponugonti
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Addy is a product strategy leader with 14 years of experience building and scaling digital platforms. As Head of Product at Atoms, he grew the Webby Award–nominated app from zero to over 120,000 monthly active users. He has led product strategy for Google, AccuWeather, Under Armour, Royal Caribbean, Hay House, and others—delivering a 30% ARR lift for AccuWeather's enterprise product and supporting AnthemIQ's path to a $15M Series A. At Spoon, Addy leads product vision and development of the industry's first AI-native restaurant back-office platform.
Michael Jackson
Co-Founder and Subject Matter Expert
Michael “MJ” Jackson is a restaurant ops and tech lifer who spent two decades inside Kerbey Lane untangling the messy systems most brands just accept. Now he turns that operator level chaos into sharp, scalable back office tech built to eliminate busywork and give restaurants their time (and margins) back.
Subodh Jena
Founding Engineer and CTO
Subodh brings over a decade of experience building AI platforms and enterprise-grade systems across back-end, web, mobile, and cloud. He has held roles like CTO at Ayrin Digital and Principal Engineer at Atoms, along with various leadership positions across startups and enterprises in his 14 years. He's built and led large engineering teams, scaled custom large language models, and shipped AI apps, voice AI, and agentic AI solutions. He's worked and consulted with companies and startups globally, collaborating with teams to create digital products for both business and consumer use. At Spoon, he leads engineering across AI, apps, platform, and cloud infrastructure, designing systems that scale for thousands of restaurants and hold up to enterprise demands.
Selina Silvas
Founding Designer
Selina brings 15 years of product design experience to Spoon, specializing in complex enterprise systems. Previously at Atoms (The official Atomic Habits app), she led product design for thousands of users. Her background spans consumer startups, TikTok-native social features, and enterprise SaaS agency work—giving her a unique lens for building restaurant operations software that's as intuitive as consumer apps but robust enough for professional kitchens.
