Palona AI discloses $28.3 million financing for restaurant automation push
The filing lifts disclosed funding to $38.3 million as Maria Zhang, Tim Howes and Steve Liu push Palona deeper into restaurant operations.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Why it matters
Palona has paired a veteran founding team with $38.3 million in disclosed capital and a focused restaurant strategy, testing whether conversational AI can drive measurable revenue in physical businesses.
Palona AI, founded by Maria Zhang (@MariaRenhui), Tim Howes and Xue "Steve" Liu, filed its first SEC Form D on August 4th, disclosing a $28.3 million equity offering marked fully sold.
The filing places a concrete figure on Palona's latest financing as the Palo Alto, California-based AI developer expands from conversational sales agents into software that handles orders and monitors operations for restaurants. A Form D is a notice filed with the SEC for securities offerings exempt from full registration requirements.
The round brings Palona's publicly disclosed financing to $38.3 million. Palona announced a $10 million seed round in January 2025 from investors including UpHonest Capital, Fusion Fund, NEO Investment Partners, Maynard Webb and other backers.
Palona's founders give the two-year-old developer an unusually seasoned leadership group. Zhang previously held engineering and AI leadership roles at Google, Meta, Tinder, Yahoo and LinkedIn. She also founded Alike, a local-recommendation app that Yahoo acquired in 2013.
Howes co-invented the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP, while at the University of Michigan. He later co-founded Loudcloud and Opsware with Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and In Sik Rhee. HP acquired Opsware for $1.65 billion in 2007. Howes also co-founded RockMelt, which Yahoo acquired in 2013, and subsequently worked on AI infrastructure at Meta.
Liu is a computer science professor at McGill University, an associate academic member of Mila and a former chief scientist at Samsung AI Center Montreal and Tinder. His work spans machine learning, distributed systems, networking and embedded computing.
From sales agents to restaurant operations
Palona launched publicly in January 2025 with emotionally responsive AI sales agents for direct-to-consumer and other consumer-facing brands. The software ingested product catalogs and customer-support material, then answered questions, recommended products, remembered preferences and attempted to increase order values through upselling.
Early deployments included smart-home device maker Wyze, wellness business MindZero and Pizza My Heart. For the pizza chain, Palona built a voice and text agent around the brand's "Jimmy the Surfer" character, allowing customers to place orders while preserving the chain's established tone.
Palona has since narrowed its commercial focus. Its current website describes Palona as an "AI operating layer" for physical businesses, with restaurants serving as its first proving ground. Palona now markets Voice AI, Catering AI and Vision AI, covering incoming calls, food orders, catering leads and video-based monitoring of restaurant operations.
That shift moves Palona into a harder deployment category than web-based customer service. Restaurant systems must handle background noise, menu modifiers, changing availability, loyalty programs, point-of-sale integrations and customers who expect orders to be correct on the first attempt. Palona says its systems exceed 98% order accuracy, a figure based on Palona's own benchmarking and continuous testing.
The restaurant focus also gives Palona a clearer business case. Missed calls, abandoned catering inquiries and incorrect orders can be tied directly to lost revenue or operating costs. Palona is selling software against those measurable failures rather than asking operators to adopt a general-purpose chatbot.
A veteran team takes a vertical bet
Zhang's founding thesis has centered on preserving personalized customer relationships as businesses grow. The restaurant strategy turns that idea into a vertical product with repeatable workflows, integrations and operating data.
Howes had invested in and advised Palona before joining as CTO. Zhang recruited him after previously working for Howes at Yahoo following the Alike acquisition. In Palona's September 2025 announcement of his appointment, Zhang described Howes as a longtime mentor who had pushed her toward senior executive roles before she believed she was ready for them.
The $28.3 million offering gives the founders a substantially larger capital base for that vertical expansion. Palona must now show that emotionally responsive agents can produce consistent results during live restaurant operations, where a polished conversation matters less than whether the order reaches the kitchen correctly and the customer receives what they requested.