By Lea Mira, RTN staff writer - 10.6.2026
Presto has raised $10 million to expand its restaurant drive-thru voice AI business, adding capital as it broadens customer deployments and builds connections with restaurant technology providers. The financing, announced September 28, came from investors affiliated with Remus Capital and other existing investors. Its recent partnerships offer a clearer picture of the company’s strategy: making automated ordering easier to implement within the systems restaurants already use.
The financing supports Presto Phoenix, Inc., which operates under the Presto name, and follows a separate $10 million financing announced in January. That earlier financing was led by Metropolitan Partners Group, with participation from Remus Capital, Link Ventures and strategic investors. The September announcement did not disclose a valuation or specify the financing structure, so the two announcements should not be treated as equivalent investment rounds.
Presto says the latest funding follows expanded deployments with existing customers, additional customer launches and continued product development. “We are investing heavily in product and operations,” said Krishna Gupta, co-founder and CEO, in the announcement. The company did not provide an updated installation count or detailed performance results, leaving operators to assess the technology through customer references and results from their own restaurants.
Presto Voice automates the conversation at the drive-thru speaker, taking customers’ orders, handling menu selections and modifications, suggesting relevant add-ons and submitting orders to the restaurant’s POS. The platform connects with compatible drive-thru equipment and supports multilingual ordering, customized greetings and offers based on the current order or time of day. Presto offers several operating configurations, ranging from autonomous AI to systems with remote human oversight or assistance when difficulties arise. That flexibility allows restaurants to choose how much support their deployment requires, with the goal of freeing employees to concentrate on food preparation, order assembly and service at the pickup window.
The business traces its roots to 2008, when Rajat Suri founded the original Presto while studying at MIT. Its early work centered on tabletop ordering and payment technology for full-service restaurants before its focus shifted toward drive-thru voice automation. The current company emerged from a December 2024 asset sale, in which a consortium led by Remus Capital, including Link Ventures and Metropolitan Partners Group, acquired assets from Presto Automation. The transaction created the privately held Presto Phoenix, retained the voice platform, technology and team, and brought an $18 million capital injection. The latest financing therefore supports a business carrying forward years of restaurant technology experience under a newer ownership structure and a concentrated focus on voice AI.
The integration also addresses a practical weakness in automated ordering. Understanding a customer’s words is only useful if the resulting order contains the correct items, prices and modifiers and reaches the appropriate preparation station. A system can repeat an order convincingly while still creating a kitchen ticket that requires an employee to intervene. Restaurants evaluating voice AI therefore need to test the entire transaction, including changes made halfway through an order.
Menu management is another part of that work. In February 2025, Presto introduced its Menu Unification product, designed to organize disparate menu data and support centralized management across restaurant locations. That capability could become particularly useful as deployments expand, because each additional restaurant brings local variations that the ordering system must handle accurately.
A promotional item might be available at one location and absent at another, while pricing, substitutions and permitted combinations can also differ. If those differences require repeated manual configuration, expansion becomes more expensive for both the restaurant and its technology provider. Reliable menu management could help Presto reduce that burden, although operators still need to establish who maintains the data and how quickly changes reach the ordering system.
Toast’s ecosystem also gives Presto access to a competitive marketplace. When Toast introduced its unified drive-thru offering in April, it named Incept AI among its voice-ordering partners and said additional integrations would follow. Presto’s connection therefore provides a route to customers while placing it alongside other providers that can compete within the same restaurant infrastructure.
For restaurant buyers, that arrangement could make comparisons more practical. Operators may be able to evaluate voice providers without replacing the underlying POS, concentrating instead on order accuracy, response speed, implementation effort and support. Presto would then need to demonstrate advantages that remain visible after installation, particularly during busy service periods.
The company is also drawing on outside expertise for the spoken interaction. Its partnership with ElevenLabs, announced in September 2025, covers voice synthesis, quality and analytics, beginning with the use of ElevenLabs voices in drive-thrus. Clearer, more natural speech may make an ordering exchange easier to follow, but restaurants should evaluate that alongside the system’s ability to understand corrections and recover from misunderstandings.
Customer expansion provides another measure of Presto’s progress. In April, Dairy Queen expanded its testing with Presto, moving from corporate-store trials to a broader pilot involving select franchisees. An expanded pilot gives a provider experience across more operating conditions, while a systemwide deployment requires a much broader implementation and support capability.
Franchised systems make that transition demanding. Locations can differ in equipment, staffing, menu configuration and management practices, even when they operate under the same brand. A successful rollout must give employees a straightforward way to take over an order, identify a problem and obtain support without creating additional confusion in the lane.
Presto faces competitors with their own deployment experience. Hi Auto reported in December 2025 that its technology was handling 100 million drive-thru orders annually across nearly 1,000 restaurants, citing customers including Bojangles, Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken and Checkers and Rally’s franchise operators. Those company-reported figures illustrate the scale of an established competitor, although they do not provide a directly comparable measure of performance against Presto.
SoundHound AI has pursued a combination of spoken ordering and visual confirmation. Its December 2024 Church’s Texas Chicken pilot announcement described a system that lets customers see their orders develop and request employee assistance. That approach highlights how the design of the complete interaction can affect reliability: customers need an easy way to catch an error before it reaches the kitchen.
Other competitors are approaching the market through brand development or deeper ownership of the underlying technology. Wendy’s has developed FreshAI with Google Cloud, while Deepgram announced its acquisition of restaurant voice AI company OfOne in January 2026, establishing the foundation for Deepgram for Restaurants. These approaches give operators different choices about customization, vendor relationships and how much of the technology comes from a single provider.
Presto’s partnerships suggest a strategy of combining specialized capabilities around restaurant ordering. That could allow it to incorporate improvements in speech technology while concentrating its own resources on menus, integrations and deployment. It also makes support arrangements important: when an order fails between the voice platform and the POS, the restaurant needs a clear escalation process rather than a debate between vendors.
The financial case requires similarly careful measurement. Time released from order taking may help employees prepare food, assemble orders or serve customers at the window, but it becomes a direct labor saving only when paid hours decline. Restaurants should account separately for staffing savings, additional capacity and service improvements, then compare those benefits with subscription fees, installation costs and ongoing support.
Upselling deserves a closer look as well. A larger average check can improve revenue, but the restaurant must consider ingredient costs, preparation time and whether additional items slow the kitchen during peak demand. Measuring incremental contribution margin alongside throughput provides a more useful picture than ticket size alone.
Pilots should therefore track outcomes across the full service cycle. An order completed by the AI is not necessarily an accurate order, and a correct ticket does not guarantee a faster handoff. Operators need to know how often employees intervene, where corrections occur and whether performance holds up during the busiest periods.
Presto’s latest financing gives it more resources to expand deployments and improve those operating details. Its Toast integration, menu tools and voice partnerships address several of the practical obstacles restaurants face when adopting automated ordering. The strongest evidence of their value will be repeatable results across locations: accurate tickets, manageable support requirements and better restaurant economics after all costs are counted.
