One AI layer across 14 restaurant tools: Choice puts a 7.1 million dollar Series A behind the idea

The pitch most restaurant technology vendors are now making is that one assistant should sit above every system an operator already pays for. Choice has put money behind that pitch.

The Next Web reported on 19 October 2026 that Choice, founded in Prague, raised a 7.1 million dollar Series A that closed in March. Investors are not named in the report. Co-founder and CEO Alex Ilyash is the named executive.

What it does

Choice AI is a layer on the company's restaurant platform that answers questions about a restaurant's data and then makes changes directly, such as updating menu prices, settings and marketing campaigns. The report says it connects to 14 restaurant tools, including point of sale, menus, reservations, customer relationship management, loyalty and QR payments, and that owners can make requests in any language.

The tasks listed are concrete: run multi-step jobs from a single request, such as a price change plus a promotion; fix menu items that fail to sync with the point of sale; build guest segments and draft campaigns for email, SMS, WhatsApp or push; summarise guest history, orders and reviews into staff notes and tags; and rework hosted websites and FAQ content so large language models can read them. Fully automated marketing and direct publishing to Facebook and Instagram are on the roadmap, not yet available.

Scale and gaps

Choice reports more than 9,000 paying restaurants and over 30,000 registered, handling more than two million orders a month worth about 50 million dollars. Its base is in Central and Eastern Europe, and it is expanding into Germany, Finland, Portugal, Spain and Italy, with a stated goal of about 150,000 businesses within five years. The report does not mention pricing and names no franchise groups among its customers.

Why a franchisor should read it

The pricing gap matters because comparable tools now publish rates. Nation's Restaurant News reported on 7 October 2026 that Toast IQ Team starts at 60 dollars a month plus 9 dollars per employee per month, and Toast IQ Grow starts at 699 dollars a month. Those are the numbers a franchise system has to put next to any mandated platform, because in a franchised network the fee lands on the franchisee while the data advantage accrues to the brand. A tool that can change menu prices across connected systems also raises a governance question: who holds the authority to approve that change, and is it recorded.

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