Company profile · 3 min read
Certus AI: voice ordering for restaurants
Certus AI answers restaurant calls, takes orders, books reservations and syncs customer conversations into POS and delivery systems.
Cofounder of Lazyweb (a16z Speedrun). Previously grew subscriptions and built native ads at Duolingo. Writes First1000 (90,000+ subscribers).
Published · Updated
What it does
Certus AI replaces a restaurant phone line with a voice agent that answers calls, takes orders, books reservations, processes delivery requests, handles questions and syncs with restaurant systems. The YC profile describes integrations with Toast, Square, Clover, UberEats and DoorDash; the current homepage shows the call flow and POS handoff.
The fit is an independent restaurant, franchise or chain where phone calls are a meaningful order and reservation channel but staff cannot answer during rushes. Certus is not useful if it cannot preserve menu, modifier, payment and reservation accuracy under real noise.
Why I’d look closer
The product has a clear operational boundary: answer instantly, gather the order item by item, confirm it, and place it into the existing POS or reservation system. The homepage reports 98.6% accuracy, under-one-second pickup and $31.86 recovered, while customer case studies report $20K+ in recovered revenue and 3,000 calls answered for one restaurant. These are company-reported/customer-selected claims, not independent measurements.
The founder context is directly relevant. The careers/about page describes Gurveer Singh as someone who grew up in a restaurant and operated 11 locations, Adam Gamieldien as a restaurant-growth operator and Isaac Nichols as an AI/automation engineer with hospitality-system experience.
What I’d ask
Which POS and reservation integrations are live, how are menu changes synchronized, and what happens when the agent is uncertain about an order, allergen or payment? I’d run a shadow call set across modifiers, accents, cancellations and peak-hour concurrency, then reconcile every order against the POS before going live.
My editorial take
Certus is a clean fit-based product for restaurants losing calls to staffing pressure. The founder-market fit is unusually strong and the workflow is easy to test. The buyer should validate order accuracy and recovery attribution rather than accept the call-capture headline.
Quick facts
| Field | Sourced detail |
|---|---|
| Buyer fit | Restaurants, franchises and chains with missed phone orders/reservations |
| Workflow | Answer, order, reserve, upsell, sync to POS/delivery systems |
| Proof signal | Company/customer case studies and accuracy claims |
| Public pricing | Not exposed in the sources checked |
Sources checked
Checked 2026-09-19.
| Source | Used for |
|---|---|
| YC company profile | Product, founders and launch context |
| Certus homepage | Current call workflow, integrations and customer proof |
| Certus careers/about | Public professional founder context |
Cohort context
Certus AI is listed in Summer 2025. In our 2026-09-18 directory snapshot, 112 of 166 listed companies in that cohort have YC’s primary industry label B2B (67.5%). This is a current-directory comparison, not an original intake count or a performance ranking. Nine-cohort dataset.
Public website snapshot
Observed 2026-09-19T16:17:58.871Z in raw homepage HTML. This records visible metadata and advertised links, not agent execution or product quality.
| Signal | Homepage observation |
|---|---|
| Product description metadata | Observed |
| Canonical link | Observed |
| H1 or H2 heading | Observed |
| Typed structured data | Observed |
| Docs/developer link | Not observed in this response |
| Pricing link | Not observed in this response |
| llms.txt link | Not observed in this response |
| Markdown alternate | Not observed in this response |
Public observations · Collection method. Missing links here do not establish that a capability or file is absent elsewhere.
About the author
Cofounder of Lazyweb (a16z Speedrun). Previously grew subscriptions and built native ads at Duolingo. Writes First1000 (90,000+ subscribers).
I cofound Lazyweb and publish Mudpie. This is an owner-written publication, not an independent testing organization. Research notes distinguish observations, sourced reporting and editorial judgment.
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