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. 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 …
