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.
We automate the person taking orders at drive-thrus with a voice AI
Title: Lilac Labs: We automate the person taking orders at drive-thrus with a voice AI | Y Combinator

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### We automate the person taking orders at drive-thrus with a voice AI

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.



Lilac Labs

Founded:2024

Team Size:2

Location:San Francisco

### Active Founders

### Tony Kam, Co-Founder / CEO

Tony is the co-founder and CEO of Lilac Labs. Tony studied EECS at UC Berkeley where focus on operating systems. Before Lilac, Tony worked at Tesla as an engineer, where he owned the display and touch component of the infotainment system. Tony also worked on the performance and reliability of driving visualization. Prior to that, Tony worked on manufacturing automation at Intel and robotics simulation at CloudMinds.



### Shelden Shi, Co-Founder / CTO

Shelden is the Co-Founder and CTO of Lilac Labs. Shelden studied CS and CogSci at UC Berkeley, where he conducted research training ML models to predict emotions via audio data. Before Lilac, Shelden was the founding engineer at Symbolic, leading the development of a Fintech lending platform with ~$1B in AUM and 30k monthly active users. Prior to that, Shelden worked at Flatiron Health, an oncology data unicorn, where he trained and built the evaluation pipeline for cancer diagnostic models.



### Company Launches

[### Lilac Labs: Drive-thru Order Taking with Voice AI](

**TLDR: Lilac Voice is an AI team member that takes orders at your drive-thru.**
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❌ **Problem:** **The quick service restaurant (QSR) industry is desperate for solutions to reduce labor costs.**
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Grappling with rising wages, high staff turnover, and an unprecedented labor shortage, quick-service restaurants (QSRs) have increased prices to maintain profitability, but have ran into the limit of what consumers are willing to accept. Drive-thru’s makes up 70% of QSR revenue as a channel and is a significant opportunity for automation. In the U.S., there are 200,000 Drive-Thrus that handle 6 billion visits a year.

✅ **Solution: We automate the person taking orders at the drive thru with a voice AI.**
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Lilac Voice is a multi-lingual AI agent that takes orders from customer through the drive-thru speaker post and sends it directly into the kitchen. It’s perfectly trained, understands the menu, and can answer questions about ingredients and allergies.

With Lilac Voice, QSR’s with drive-thrus can: 1) save labor cost of up to 1 full-time employee, 2) boost revenue through consistent and relevant upsell, 3) improve the customer experience with faster speed of service and higher order accuracy, and 4) improve staff retention!

As an example: In CA, as of April 1st, the fast food minimum wage grew from $16 to $20. For a drive-thru operating 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, that’s $100,000+ in labor savings alone.

**🙋Our Ask: How you can help.**
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**Share this post!** We’re looking for more customers to onboard for this Summer! We’d love intros to franchisee operators, restaurant groups, or leadership at corporate chain.

**Quick blurb to copy & paste:** Lilac Labs is offering free pilots for their voice AI drive-thru solution. The team consists of ex-Tesla engineers and Berkeley researchers. Learn more at [ For a demo and free pilot, contact [tony@lilaclabs.ai](mailto:tony@lilaclabs.ai).



\- [Tony]( and [Shelden](
