Kaamai · Investor Deck · September 2026
The back office that runs itself — for the independent restaurants the $200–600 incumbents priced out.
kaamai.app · Aswin Kumar Manoharan, Founder
The problem
Independent restaurants run on vendor texts, paper invoices, and memory. Every month they overpay on price spikes nobody catches, pay duplicate invoices twice, and burn manager-hours on clipboards.
reported food-cost increase YoY; labor +23% (Popmenu 2025)
name food costs as their top inventory challenge, up from 39% (TouchBistro 2026)
of operators plan to expand AI use; profitability is the #1 goal at 40% (Toast)
Solution
Vendors text, call, or email exactly like always. Kaamai parses every message into clean orders, OCRs every invoice against POs, flags overcharges before money moves, and tracks inventory — over SMS, WhatsApp, and voice. Zero setup: text TRY to (505) 520-3320 and you have an account.
Any channel → parsed line items → one-tap approval
Photo OCR + 3-way matching + spike flags
Live stock, pars, reorder alerts, recipes
One inbox, AI confirmations, quiet hours
How it works
Workflow · Orders
Workflow · Invoices
Workflow · Inventory & margin
Par levels, reorder points, low-stock alerts before mid-service runouts. Receiving updates stock automatically.
Real-time margins per dish; ingredient price changes ripple instantly.
Log by reason and cost; see exactly where food cost leaks.
Workflow · Communications
Workflow · Voice AI
AI workforce
Agents own jobs (inventory, duplicates, spikes, margins, payables, waste…) — the owner only ever sees dollars saved. Text any of them by name from a phone.
Inventory, duplicates, price spikes
Recipes, margins, payables
Waste, credits, order intake
Matching, receiving, prep, insights, follow-ups
Marketplace · Model 2 live
Vendors confirm/edit/decline POs in their portal; diffs + accept flow; versioned audit trail.
Browse verified vendors with scorecards from real order data — on-time, fill rate, price accuracy.
Delivery-day edits, substitutions with lineage, order cutoffs.
Trust · Verification ladder + KYB
Billing · live on Stripe
Orders, invoices, inventory, core messaging, 5 agents, 1 location.
Everything bundled — cheaper than the à la carte sum ($106).
Reports, analytics, integrations, API, all agents, voice pack, extra locations.
7-day trial, card upfront, enforced lockout + reminders. À la carte total exceeds Pro — the bundle sells itself.
Unit economics
| Line | Math |
|---|---|
| Starter ARPU | $29 base; Pro $99; add-ons stack to $106 ceiling |
| COGS / location | Messages ~$0.004–0.01 · voice ~$0.07/min · AI tokens pennies — capped by plan meters + WA budgets |
| Trial → paid | Card upfront + enforced lockout + day-5 reminder; no free-forever path |
| Expansion | Locations, voice minutes, message packs, vendor-side fees (marketplace) |
Moat
Go to market
One word → trial account. Flyers, counters, vendor word-of-mouth.
Every vendor interaction is a Kaamai impression + invite path.
Partner codes for accountants, distributors, POS stores — attributed in-product.
Warm-lead calling at ~$0.40/call, books demos into a real calendar.
Validation plan
The savings ledger, accuracy tracker, and activation funnel are already recording. First cohort proves: invoice accuracy ≥ incumbent, weekly dollar savings per location, and activation without founder field sales. Go/no-go on those three — not on feature count.
Review outcomes + corrections measured from day one
Auditable savings per location, texted every Monday
Signup → vendor → order → approval → first dollar, timed
Competition
| Them | Them, precisely | Us |
|---|---|---|
| MarginEdge, R365 | $199–600/location, full suites | $29, text-native, zero setup |
| Tandem, Loop AI | Funded AI back-office, top-down | Bottom-up: vendors already text; independents first |
| Choco, BlueCart | Procurement marketplaces | Ordering + back-office, marketplace as wedge not moat |
Risks, named with mitigations
3-way matching + human-in-the-loop + measured issue rate. Trust instrumented, not assumed.
Per-location budgets, SMS fallback, quiet hours — live before billing hits.
Funnel timed per stage; demo data + TRY collapse time-to-wow to minutes.
Narrower customer, sharper outcome: dollars saved for independents, published weekly.
The ask
Live product · live billing · real channels. Raising to fund the first 10-location cohort and turn measured savings into the growth story.
Start a trial — kaamai.appAppendix A · Order intake
WhatsApp/SMS/voice/email → webhook (instant 200, background process, idempotent)
→ LLM parse → deterministic fallback → vendor-name filter
→ vendor fuzzy-match → single: create PO · ambiguous: button ask-back
→ dispatch (SMS/WhatsApp template/buttons, quiet-hour outbox, budget guard)
→ vendor YES/buttons → CONFIRMED · 2h nudge if silent
Appendix B · Invoice & savings
Photo/email invoice → OCR + line extraction → SKU match
→ 3-way match (invoice × PO × receiving) → spike/duplicate/hand-edit flags
→ owner approve/dispute (app, text, or chat) → savings ledger ($)
→ Monday savings text · accuracy ledger tracks every correction
Appendix C · Voice loops
Vendor agent (Twilio): dial → say script → record → instant ACK + hold audio
→ background transcribe/classify → closer or retry (max 2) → PO updated
Sales rep (ConversationRelay + DeepSeek): warm lead → stream tokens to TTS
→ calendar tools (slots/book) → demo booked or trial text → transcript + outcome in D1
Appendix D · Trial & billing machine
Signup / TRY → trial_ends_at = +7d → day-5 reminder → Stripe checkout (card upfront)
→ webhook drives plan + trial clock → expiry locks API (402) except billing/settings
→ lapse drops plan + add-ons · owner alerted at every step
Appendix E · Stack
Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2, KV, Durable Objects, Pages
Telnyx + Twilio (SMS/voice), Meta WhatsApp Cloud, Cloudflare Email
Workers AI (OCR/parse), Llama classifiers, DeepSeek sales turns
Stripe subscriptions, trials, add-ons, webhooks
Self-hosted Punctual (Workers + D1) + Google sync
171-test suite, admin health + activation + audit instrumentation