Certus AI (YC S25) — Replacing the restaurant phone line with voice AI

In their words

Certus AI is replacing the restaurant phone line with Voice AI. Restaurants lose up to $100,000 per year per location from missed calls, lost orders, and abandoned hold lines. Staff are overwhelmed. IVRs frustrate customers. Call centers are expensive and impersonal. It’s 2025. Guests don’t leave voicemails or wait on hold. They just move on. Certus is an AI voice agent built for restaurants. It answers every call, 24/7 — taking orders, processing deliveries, booking reservations, upselling, and handling complaints in English, Spanish, French and more. Certus is built to manage the phone line end to end, from the customer call to the restaurant tech stack, with zero human intervention required. It currently integrates with industry-leading systems like Toast, Square, Clover, UberEats, DoorDash, and more. We’re building the voice layer of the modern restaurant — the employee they’ll never fire. We started Certus because we lived the pain. Gurveer (CEO) grew up answering phones in his family’s restaurant and helped operate them, growing from 1 to 11 locations in 7 years. Later, he and Adam (CRO) ran a restaurant growth startup to help others increase revenue, but kept watching clients bleed cash because no one picked up the phone. So we built the solution the industry always wished existed. Until now, this problem was considered unsolvable. But Voice AI has finally crossed the conversational chasm and 72% of consumers now prefer AI over humans as long as it means faster and better service. More importantly, the market is begging for this. The North American restaurant industry crossed $1 trillion in 2024, and it's projected to hit $1.5 trillion in 2025. Yet over $100 billion is still lost annually to missed calls, human error, and outdated tech. As the market continues to grow, so do the losses! Our customers say it best: - “Certus changed my life overnight.” - “We were losing the ability to give great in-house service — the phone was killing us.” - “70% of my business comes through the phone. That’s mine and my 16 staffs livelihood.” - “Before Certus, I used to lose 40 - 60 calls a day…. now my printer just stays printing!” - “I’ve been in the business 38 years. I’ve been waiting for this since then.” Certus is here to fix the $120B phone problem — one call at a time. And in doing so, we’re redefining how the restaurant industry communicates forever, starting with the phone line.

What the record says