After studying Computer Science at Cambridge University, Christian Mouysset set up a chain of restaurants in London called Hummus Bros. It's there that he experienced firsthand the problem that Tenzo (Techstars 2016) is now solving: all of a restaurant's data was siloed across dozens of tools, which someone in the head office collated in Excel so that the GMs in the branch could have visibility as to how to make their branch profitable. The issue was that GMs didn't trust the data that was manually collated; it was in Excel, which they could not easily view on mobile, and it always arrived after the fact. Tenzo collates this data in real-time and allows operators to visualise it on their mobile, allowing them to make data-driven decisions & supercharge their performance.

What does your company do, and why is it important?

Tenzo supercharges restaurant performance by allowing its operations teams to make data-driven decisions. Restaurants are the heart of many communities and are where countless people have their first interaction with the business world. For these reasons, we want them to go from surviving to thriving.

What sets your company apart from competitors?

We are built by restaurateurs for restaurateurs, meaning that we truly understand the problems that our customers face. We are also computer scientists at heart, meaning that we are bringing the bleeding edge of technology to the hospitality industry.

Unlike most of our competitors, we process all the data in real-time, display it on mobile, have launched TenzoGPT so that they can chat with their data, and made the UI/UX easy for people in the industry who are not technical and don't have a background in data science.

What advice would you give aspiring founders who are just starting out?

I would recommend to anyone who is just starting to apply to Techstars - we did it 3 months after setting up the company, and it was the best and one of the most fun experiences we had along the way of building Tenzo.

What's been your proudest milestone so far, and what did it take to get there?

Signing some of the brands I admire the most in the restaurant industry - JKS, Honest Burgers, The Fat Duck, Ottolenghi, The Hoxton... It took building a great product and a lot of blood, sweat and tears to build the reputation where these groups trusted us to give us a chance.

What’s one aspect of the accelerator experience that surprised you?

Having previously set up a business, I was not sure what value an accelerator would provide. Techstars was amazing - it helped us polish the pitch in a matter of weeks, get connected to the right people in the ecosystem, and put us in front of 600 investors, which helped us close our seed round in a very short amount of time.

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