“Hal, order sushi for two tonight.”
A Westford startup called Every Labs is working on the artificially intelligent food-ordering app of the future. While the company’s Chef Nightly app isn’t yet publicly available, a handful of Bostonians have been testing it in recent weeks. And the company has already raised early funding from the startup incubator Blade and Boston Syndicates, a group that includes individual investors and the Cambridge venture capital firm Atlas Venture.
Every Labs founder Michael Sheeley, previously a top executive at mobile startups Mobee and RunKeeper, wasn’t ready to say much about the app. But last November, he told me that he’d been watching food delivery services like Boston-based Foodler, GrubHub, and Eat24 grow, and noting that “those products are exactly the same thing.” Sheeley says that with Every Labs, founded last summer, “We took a clean state and said, ‘What’s the actual problem?'”
Several people who have seen versions of the app tell me that it tries to understand your ordering-in habits and make suggestions about what you might enjoy. If Monday night is always pizza night, one cheese and one veggie, it can learn that and start to suggest that order with a notification on your phone a little while before you usually place the order. Users can make adjustments to their usual orders to try something different, or adjust quantities.
Sheeley says that Chef Nightly will provide pointers to the most popular restaurants and dishes in your neighborhood, based on actual orders. “You’ll know who has the best sandwich where you live, who’s good and who’s not,” he says.
On its site, Chef Nightly is recruiting independent restaurateurs to be part of its network. “We only partner with a select number of restaurants so we can drive a large volume of online orders to your restaurant,” the site says. Sheeley confirms that the startup is only focused on simplifying the ordering process, and relaying those orders to restaurants — it isn’t hiring its own army of delivery-people.
The team at Every Labs includes Sheeley’s brother, Bret, a software developer who previously worked at Cartera Commerce. The company has four full-time employees.
Sheeley says Chef Nightly will launch simultaneously for Android and iOS.
