Ex-HighRadius Leaders Raise USD 4M for Kutlerri.ai, AI Agents That Lift Restaurant Profit
Kutlerri.ai has raised $4 million from Houston-based Narahari Investments to scale AI agents that grow revenue and cut costs for restaurants. Kiran Rana (CEO) and Payal Tripathy (COO), both ex-HighRadians, founded the company in December 2025, with offices in Houston, Texas and Bhubaneswar, Odisha. Ten months in, Kutlerri.ai has a live product and more than 10 signed customers. In this first phase it serves US operators, while keeping the door open to India and other markets. Its product and engineering team works out of Bhubaneswar. The round will scale the AI Catering Sales Agent, its first commercial agent. It will also bring three agents now in beta to market and fund a mobile-first self-service app.
Big sales, tiny profits
US restaurants will sell $1.55 trillion of food this year, yet 42 percent of them did not make a profit last year.[1] Even before costs climbed after the pandemic, a typical restaurant kept only about five cents of every dollar it earned.[2] On a margin that thin, small gains go a long way: one extra cent on every dollar lifts profit by 20 percent. That is why Kutlerri.ai works on just two numbers, the revenue coming in and the cost going out.
Every system in a restaurant reports the problem. None of them fixes it.
A US restaurant already runs plenty of software. It has a POS, a kitchen display, inventory, online ordering, payroll and accounting. Each one records what happened. None of them acts on it. A catering inquiry goes unanswered. Delivery ads keep running with nothing to show for them. Fixing that takes a real person on the job, and most independent restaurants never hire one.
Kutlerri.ai builds AI agents to do that work. Each agent takes on one job, on either revenue or cost. Revenue agents work catering, third-party delivery and online ordering. Cost agents work delivery ad spend, food and labor costs, and daily prep and waste.
Restaurants get two ways to work with the agents. Kutlerri.ai can run them end to end as a managed service. Or operators can run them through a mobile-first self-service app, coming soon. Either way, the fee is a percentage of the revenue an agent brings in or the cost it saves. If nothing moves, nothing is owed.
$450,000 in new revenue for the design partner
Catering went first. It is the biggest order a US restaurant takes, and the least worked. Across more than 8,000 locations and 2 million catering orders, 60 percent of orders came from 5 percent of customers.[3] Those few customers decide the channel. Someone has to bring in new ones and win back the ones who stopped ordering. Most restaurants have nobody to do it.
The AI Catering Sales Agent does that job. It finds catering-fit businesses within 30 miles of a location. It reaches them by email, text and phone. It reconnects with past customers who have stopped ordering. It answers inbound calls, chats and emails. Then it closes the order. The operator approves the decisions and keeps the customer.
Kutlerri.ai built the agent hand in hand with RASA, a five-location fast-casual group in the Washington, D.C. area. The two teams worked side by side inside a real restaurant business. RASA showed what an operator actually needs from catering sales, and Kutlerri.ai built the agent around it. RASA paid for the service throughout. In 10 months, the agent has booked RASA $450,000 in new catering revenue, more than 10 times what it paid, without a single new hire. The agent is now live with operators in most major US cities.
Why two growth leaders bet on restaurants
Kiran and Payal come from businesses where every line of the P&L has an owner. At a restaurant run by someone close to them, they found the opposite: every system recorded the numbers, but no one worked them.
They met more operators, from fast-casual owners to multi-location groups doing $3 million a year, and heard the same story. The data was scattered, problems showed up too late and decisions were made on feel. Margins had not moved in years. Kutlerri.ai was built to work those numbers for them.
Five more agents to ship, and the team to ship them
Kutlerri.ai's product, marketing, business development and sales teams all work from India. None of them is a support function. Each one owns a number that shows up on a US restaurant's P&L.
With five agents behind the first, Kutlerri.ai is actively scaling across strategy, marketing, customer success and engineering teams. Every hire joins on one rule from the company's culture: if you see it and touch it, you drive it until it works, not until your part is done.
Applications go to [email protected].
References
National Restaurant Association, 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry. US restaurant and foodservice sales forecast, and operator profitability survey for 2025.
- National Restaurant Association, “Elevated costs continue to pressure restaurant profitability,” July 2026.
- MONKEY, State of Catering 2026. Transactional data from more than 8,000 locations and 2 million catering orders.
Disclaimer: The above press release comes to you under an arrangement with PR agency. UNI takes no editorial/ legal responsibility for the same.
