heytruffle Lands Funding to Scale Its Human-Monitored Restaurant AI Concierge Nationwide

When the dining room is slammed and the host stand is buried, the phone is usually the first casualty. That ringing line at the front desk represents reservations, catering leads, private-event inquiries, and pickup orders — real revenue slipping through the cracks every peak-hour rush. A Fort Lauderdale-based startup thinks the answer isn't another dashboard for operators to babysit, but a fully managed service that simply handles the call.

heytruffle, a managed AI phone concierge built for multi-location restaurant groups, has raised new funding from New York-based Preface Ventures. The company also unveiled a rebrand — it was formerly known as RestoHost — and says the capital will fuel a nationwide expansion across the United States.

A Growing Market for Restaurant AI

The timing tracks with where the money is going. In a 2025 Deloitte study, 82 percent of restaurant executives said they planned to increase their AI investment — though the report noted that industry adoption still lags the appetite. A separate 2025 Toast survey of more than 700 operators found that 86 percent were comfortable using AI.

Much of that interest is driven by a labor squeeze. The National Restaurant Association's 2025 State of the Industry report found that many operators simply don't have enough staff to meet current demand. When dining rooms are short-handed, the phone goes unanswered — and unanswered calls are missed covers, missed catering orders, and frustrated guests.

A Different Bet on How to Build Voice AI

heytruffle is taking a deliberately different path from much of the category. Many voice AI tools are engineered to automate fast and run on their own. heytruffle instead sells a managed service: it trains a custom AI concierge for each restaurant, then pairs it with a human team that reviews calls and refines the system every week.

The concierge handles reservations, catering, private events, and guest questions, and routes callers to staff when a person is genuinely needed. The company frames the model as a way to protect the guest experience — not replace employees — and traces the approach to its own background running restaurants.

"Restaurants do not need another piece of software to manage," said Lucas Espina, founder and CEO of heytruffle. "They need the phone handled with the same care they give the guests in the room. This funding lets us bring that to more restaurant groups."

Traction With a High-Volume Group

One client shows the model working at scale. Rreal Tacos, a 12-location group in Georgia, runs heytruffle across all of its restaurants, where the service handles more than 20,000 calls a month. In a typical month, it supported the seating of 14,085 guests — capturing peak-hour demand that a busy host stand couldn't always reach.

Where the Funding Goes

The new investment from Preface Ventures will support heytruffle's expansion to more restaurant groups nationwide. Alongside the announcement, the company broadened what its concierge can do:

• Order-taking for pickup and delivery, added to the concierge's capabilities.
• An OpenTable integration that lets the concierge manage reservations inside a platform many restaurants already use.
• Multilingual support, with the concierge operating in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German.

Crucially, the service is designed to plug into the systems operators already rely on — including their POS and reservation tools — rather than adding another silo to manage.

Why It Matters

For multi-unit operators, this is a pointed reminder that the phone channel is still a leaky bucket — and one AI is increasingly positioned to plug. If a 12-location group can field 20,000 calls a month and convert peak-hour demand into 14,085 seated guests, the revenue math on missed calls is hard to ignore, especially when staffing gaps mean those calls would otherwise go unanswered.

The managed-service model is the strategic wrinkle worth watching. Many operators have been burned by "set-it-and-forget-it" tech that quietly degrades and demands internal oversight nobody has time for. A human-in-the-loop approach — with weekly call review and tuning — shifts the maintenance burden off the operator, which may lower the barrier for groups wary of automating guest interactions. For procurement and operations leaders evaluating voice AI, the practical questions are integration depth (does it work with your existing POS and reservation stack?), how escalation to live staff is handled, and whether multilingual coverage matches your guest base.

Bottom line: as AI investment climbs but adoption still trails intent, tools that promise fewer moving parts — not more — are likely to win the operator's attention. The competitive edge here isn't novelty; it's answering the phone every single time.

The Takeaway for Operators

heytruffle offers a live demo of its AI concierge at demo.heytruffle.ai for operators who want to hear the experience before they buy. If you run a multi-location group, it's worth auditing how many calls your host stands actually miss during peak service — that number is often the real business case.

How is your restaurant group handling the phone channel as AI matures? For more on how hospitality tech is reshaping operations, see our coverage of Deliverect and SoundHound AI's automated voice ordering and Converge AI's AI-native workspace for multi-unit restaurants. Weigh in with your take in the comments.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Top 40 Under 40” for founding American Wholesale Floral. Politz is also the founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.