Lilac Labs — We automate the person taking orders at drive-thrus with a voice AI
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Industry: B2B
Tags: SaaS, Restaurant Tech, AI, Conversational AI
YC batch: S24 | Status: Active | Team size: 2

At Lilac, we automate the person taking order at the drive thru with a voice AI. We're building this for Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) dealing with an historical labor shortage and rising wages.

Previous attempts at drive-thru voice ordering are costly to implement and have failed to deliver the accuracy and latency needed. It's now possible to build a voice interface that passes the threshold for a great customer experience.

In the United States, there are 200,000 Drive-Thrus handling 6 Billion visits a year. At 3 minutes per order, that's 34,000 human years spent on taking orders annually. Per location, on average we can deliver around $100,000 of value in terms of labor savings, upsell revenue lift, and training costs.