Owner Raises $240M Led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives at $2.3B Valuation

Big corporations spend billions on tech and marketing. Local restaurants can’t afford that. Owner, the company building AI to close that gap, has announced a $240 million round at a $2.3 billion valuation. Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round, with existing investors Meritech, Redpoint Ventures, and Headline participating, along with angel investor Jack Altman, brother of OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman.

Owner positions itself as the AI CMO and CTO for local businesses. It builds and runs a restaurant’s website, online ordering, mobile app, CRM, customer support, POS, and AI phone ordering, with AI agents managing and improving each piece automatically. Ask Owner to promote a menu item, and its agents will design the promotion, update the website, build the campaign, generate the creative, and publish it. The same agents answer the phone, take orders, reply to reviews and emails, and handle customer support. The company says restaurants using its platform grow online traffic by 40% on average within 30 days, grow direct online revenue by more than 40% in their first year, and see customers on branded apps reorder at twice the rate of non-app users.

Founded in 2020, Owner has surpassed $100 million in ARR. Independent restaurants will drive more than $1 billion in sales through the platform this year alone, and Owner now powers more U.S. locations than Domino’s or Taco Bell, with more than 100 million American consumers having used it. It’s the top-rated restaurant technology on both Capterra and G2.

Co-founder and CEO Adam Guild dropped out of high school at 16, after running a Minecraft server that had already made him hundreds of thousands of dollars. He started the company after watching his mother, who ran a dog-grooming business, struggle to attract customers. Co-founder and CTO Dean Bloembergen previously built technology for restaurant chains including Blaze Pizza and Sharky’s, and co-founded Marble, a self-ordering kiosk company; his parents are also small business owners. The two companies merged in 2020 to become Owner. “The world is racing to build AI to replace people’s jobs. Owner is building AI to do the opposite: to do the jobs many small business owners have never been able to afford,” Guild said. “Now, for the first time, local restaurants have the same tech advantages as the huge chains they compete with. And soon every small local business, including grocers and salons, will have those advantages too.”

Owner raised a $3.46 million seed round in 2020, then a $33 million Series B in January 2024 led by Redpoint Ventures, before raising $120 million in a Series C co-led by Meritech and Headline in May 2025 that made it a unicorn at a $1 billion valuation. This Series D more than doubles that valuation again. The team includes leaders from Shopify, DoorDash, Compass, Salesforce, and HubSpot, and more than 35 team members are former founders. The company says it uses AI throughout its own development, building in weeks or months what once took years. The new funding will go toward serving every U.S. independent restaurant, international expansion, and bringing Owner’s AI system to other local businesses like salons, spas, and independent grocers.

Restaurant tech is already crowded. Publicly traded Toast (NYSE: TOST) built its business around POS, yet says its customers represent only 6% of the roughly 860,000 restaurant locations in the U.S. — a sign of how much room is still left. SpotOn has already reached unicorn status, and Popmenu, which has raised $87 million, combined its tech stack with SpotOn’s in April to unify online ordering, payments, marketing, and in-store operations. Where most competitors started in one layer — POS or online ordering — and expanded from there, often through M&A, Owner set out from day one to wrap marketing and operations together under one set of AI agents.