Palona goes vertical, launches Vision, Workflow: 4 key lessons for AI builders

Building an enterprise AI company on a "foundation of shifting sand" is the central challenge for founders today, according to the leadership at Palona AI . Credit: VentureBeat made with Flux 2 Pro on Fal.ai Image of Palona Vision in action. Credit: Palona AI Today, the Palo Alto-based startup-led by former Google and Meta engineering veterans-is making a decisive vertical push into the restaurant and hospitality space with today's launch of Palona Vision and Palona Workflow. The new offerings transform the company’s multimodal agent suite into a real-time operating system for restaurant operations - spanning cameras, calls, conversations, and coordinated task execution. The news marks a strategic pivot from the company’s debut in early 2025 , when it first emerged with $10 million in seed funding to build emotionally intelligent sales agents for broad direct-to-consumer enterprises. Now, by narrowing its focus to a "multimodal native" approach for restaurants, Palona is providing a blueprint for AI builders on how to move beyond "thin wrappers" to build deep systems that solve high-stakes physical world problems. “You’re building a company on top of a foundation that is sand-not quicksand, but shifting sand,” said co-founder and CTO Tim Howes, referring to the instability of today’s LLM ecosystem. “So we built an orchestration layer that lets us swap models on performance, fluency, and cost.” VentureBeat spoke with Howes and co-founder and CEO Maria Zhang in person recently at - where else? - a restaurant in NYC about the technical challenges and hard lessons learned from their launch, growth, and pivot. The New Offering: Vision and Workflow as a ‘Digital GM’ For the end user-the restaurant owner or operator-Palona’s latest release is designed to function as an automated "best operations manager" that never sleeps. Palona Vision uses in-store security cameras to analyze operational signals - such as queue lengths, table turnover, prep bottlenecks, and cleanliness - without requiring any new hardware. It monitors front-of-house metrics like queue lengths, table turns, and cleanliness, while simultaneously identifying back-of-house issues like prep slowdowns or station setup errors. Palona Workflow complements this by automating multi-step operational processes. This includes managing catering orders, opening and closing checklists, and food prep fulfillment. By correlating video signals from Vision with Point-of-Sale (POS) data and staffing levels, Workflow ensures consistent execution across multiple locations. “Palona Vision is like giving every location a digital GM,” said Shaz Khan, founder of Tono Pizzeria + Cheesesteaks, in a press release provided to VentureBeat. “It flags issues before they escalate and saves me hours every week.” Going Vertical: Lessons in Domain Expertise Palona’s journey began with a star-studded roster. CEO Zhang previously served as VP of Engineering at Google and CTO of Tinder, while Co-founder Howes is the co-inventor of LDAP and a former Netscape CTO. Despite this pedigree, the team’s first year was a lesson in the necessity of focus. Initially, Palona served fashion and electronics brands, creating "wizard" and "surfer dude" personalities to handle sales. However, the team quickly realized that the restaurant industry presented a...

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