Voice artificial intelligence provider Presto Phoenix, Inc. has secured $10 million in financing from Remus Capital-affiliated investors and existing backers.
The capital injection is structured to accelerate commercial deployments of the company's proprietary drive-thru automation platform, Presto Voice, while funding ongoing product development and operational scaling across quick-service restaurant (QSR) chains.
The funding round follows a period of accelerated technical adoption across hospitality drive-thru lanes, where restaurant operators face persistent wage pressures and look to digital automation to stabilise order accuracy, improve service speed, and capture transaction data.
"Over the past several months, we've continued to prove that Voice AI can deliver meaningful results at scale across some of the most demanding drive-thru environments and menus," said Krishna Gupta, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Presto.
"We are investing heavily in product and operations as we help more of the industry adapt to the inevitable agentic future. Every QSR brand is realising they must increase digitalisation and standardisation across their business, and Presto is the natural partner to help them do that for their largest channel – it all starts with Voice."
Platform Expansion and Proprietary AI Architecture
Presto plans to allocate the capital directly toward enhancing its core speech-recognition technology, conversational natural language processing, and integration layers.
The drive-thru ordering environment presents acute technical hurdles for automated voice agents, including ambient traffic noise, varied regional accents, dynamic order modifications, and complex menu logic. The company has concentrated engineering resources on lowering order escalation rates, ensuring automated systems can handle variable consumer requests directly before requiring intervention from kitchen staff.
The investment will also support the expansion of Presto Voice across existing restaurant client networks, alongside onboarding new multi-unit franchise operators and corporate restaurant brands.
Integration Partnerships with Toast and AI Specialists
To streamline deployment into existing restaurant technology stacks, Presto has integrated its platform with point-of-sale (POS) and specialised software providers.
The company recently completed technical integrations with restaurant management platform Toast, allowing operators using Toast hardware and software to deploy Presto's voice systems without re-engineering core ordering architecture.
In parallel, Presto has incorporated external artificial intelligence components into its proprietary software stack, forming commercial partnerships with speech synthesis specialist ElevenLabs and automation platform Bluejay. These integrations support low-latency synthetic speech generation and robust natural language understanding, refining the conversational flow between consumers and the drive-thru audio interface.
QSR Digitalisation and Labour Dynamics
The transaction highlights growing venture and institutional investment into operational artificial intelligence designed specifically for the restaurant and hospitality sectors.
With the drive-thru channel generating up to 70% of total sales volume for major American fast-food chains, automating voice ordering serves as an essential efficiency mechanism. By reducing labour hours dedicated solely to headset order taking, restaurant operators can redeploy staff toward kitchen prep, food assembly, and order fulfilment, accelerating vehicle throughput during peak trading periods.
"AI is digitalising the world, and we are now seeing clear tailwinds for QSR adoption to accelerate: the labour environment, the need to standardise best practices, and the realisation that without the data there is no way to keep up with agentic leaders," said John Tincoff of Remus Capital.
Presto will utilise the $10 million capital injection to scale its customer onboarding infrastructure, expand engineering teams, and widen installation footprints across high-volume quick-service franchise networks.
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