Building the Intelligence System for Restaurants

From a scrappy procurement approval app built for his own restaurant to a full-stack restaurant intelligence platform operating across Dubai, London, Australia, Hong Kong, and beyond, Dani El Zein has done the startup thing the hard way, and wouldn't have it any other way. In this edition of Founder's Hustle, we sit down with the founder of Supy to talk about his pivot from investment banking to startups, the honest story behind Supy's near-restart, raising $9.5M with zero revenue, the week his entire bank account nearly vanished, and why he believes a CEO should always be the CPO.

From Banking to Startups

Dani didn't set out to build a restaurant tech company. He spent six years in investment banking (M&A, ECM, DCM) and by his own admission, it was a great job. But it didn't keep him wired. "It didn't excite me as much as being in startups," he says. "I wanted something that would keep me wired and get me excited to go to work every morning."

So he made the leap, joining Quiqup, a last-mile logistics startup, where he joined as a market launcher. That move, away from structured finance and into operational chaos, set the foundation for everything that followed.

The Restaurant That Started It All

Supy didn’t begin with a grand vision. It started with a problem Dani experienced firsthand. While at Quiqup, he and a group of friends opened a restaurant, despite having zero operating experience. Very quickly, reality hit.  "Costs on all aspects, food, labor, entertainment, they just add up, and you don't feel them adding up," he recalls. "At the end of the day, you just stopped making profits."

Food cost was the biggest line item. His first instinct was to control it at the source: build an approval workflow between himself and the chef, so nothing got ordered without his sign-off. Because he was already working in tech at Quiqup and surrounded by engineers and product managers, building something felt natural. He found a freelancer, thought it would take a week, and launched. That was the very first version of Supy: a procurement approval app with no business model and no clear path to revenue.

Free Tool, Wrong Problem

For the first couple of years, Supy was free. Dani gave the product away, grew a user base, and by his own admission, had no idea how he was going to monetize it. "I wish I had thought more about what the business model would be," he says. "That was the biggest challenge." 

But the issue ran deeper than monetization. The product itself, a procurement approval tool, wasn’t solving a meaningful enough problem. “I thought being able to control my chef was going to make a difference,” he says. “But I don’t even know if what he’s ordering makes sense or not.” That was the flaw: control without context. Approving orders didn’t reduce costs if you didn’t have visibility into inventory, procurement, and how those decisions actually translated into food costs.

That gap became impossible to ignore.  

The Pivot and the Low Points

AddMind, one of his early customers, told him they were switching to a competitor, a more complete inventory management platform. Instead of accepting the loss, Dani made a bet. "I told AddMind: what they offer, I have. Just wait three months."

He went back to the company, let go of 20–30% of the team, and told the rest they were scrapping everything and building an inventory system from scratch. "Everyone laughed. My co-founder didn't take me seriously." But Dani was serious. The team spent eight months heads-down building before launching a new product in June 2023.

It was a hard reset. He didn't convert most of his old user base. The new product launched buggy: you couldn't edit a typo in an ingredient name, and you couldn't download a report. "I launched with such an MVP," he says. "But that was a very conscious decision, and if I were to do it again, I would build the product in the same way." The market bug-fixed for them, and the feedback loop shaped everything that came after.

Raising $9.5M with No Revenue

What makes the pivot story even more striking is that Supy had already raised $9.5 million before it had any revenue. When asked how, Dani is direct: "When you're raising funds, you're selling. You're selling a vision."

The mission he pitched then, helping restaurants reduce food costs, is the same mission today. The product to achieve it changed; the north star didn't. "We didn't pivot and start a new business. We pivoted to make sure we can achieve our mission."

But he's also candid about the downside of raising early. "Once you raise funds, the clock starts ticking. You have a budget to follow, targets to achieve, investors to respond to." That pressure, he says, is exactly why some founders are scared to pivot even when they know they should. You don't know what's on the other side. His advice now: before raising funds, before scaling, make sure you have genuine product-market fit. Don't just go with the flow.

From Feature to Platform

In the early days, one risk loomed large: becoming a feature, not a product.  "Your switching costs are very low," Dani explains. "Any customer can just rip out the software and bring something else." A good-to-have, not a must-have.

The antidote was depth. Today, Supy is a single product with over 1,000 interconnected features spanning inventory management, procurement, purchasing, and menu engineering. "We sell one product, but this product has 1,000-plus features that are all interconnected." The goal was always the same: move from low switching costs to high switching costs. Make it painful, in the best possible way, to leave.

That depth fundamentally changed the company’s positioning; from a nice-to-have tool to a core operating system. It also clarified the ideal customer: not single restaurants, but multi-location groups with enough complexity to truly need the product.

From Hustle to Repeatability

Getting to the first million in ARR was, in Dani's words, pure hustle. "Knocking on doors, asking for intros, harassing people on LinkedIn, emails, cold calls." His ex-chef made introductions. Friends and family helped. No paid channels, no partnerships, just relentless outbound.

The strategy that worked, and still works, is the ambassador model. "You need a client ambassador who will help you get others," he says. When Supy launched in the UK, they signed Black Bear Burger, now rated one of the top burgers in the world. In Dubai, it was AddMind. In Australia, Slims Quality Burger. In Hong Kong, Doughbros. None of them are household names globally, but in each market, they gave Supy the credibility to walk into the next conversation. "When you're a newcomer, you're always gonna be asked: who do you work with?"

But after the 1M ARR milestone, the company began shifting toward a more structured growth engine. “You always need to be hustling, and we still are,” he says. “ But at some point you also need more predictability in how you win and how you grow.”

That means understanding which channels actually move the needle: paid ads, partnerships, referrals, SEO, and product-led growth. The goal is to reach a stage where growth isn’t just driven by effort, but by repeatable systems, where the unit economics of each growth lever are clear and reliable.

Supy is approaching that phase now. Revenue is becoming more predictable. When those growth levers become consistent, Dani says, “that’s when you enter a really fun stage.” Supy, he believes, is getting close.

Launching a New Market

That same balance of instinct and signal shows up in how Supy expands geographically. Launching a new market, in Supy's definition, means actively selling, hiring locally, spending marketing dollars, and building partnerships on the ground, not just having a few inbound customers who found you on Google. The decision to launch Australia, for instance, came from an experienced operator who told Dani plainly that every other restaurant software was subpar and Supy was exceptional. "He was a legend in hospitality," Dani says. "A guy who'd sold his previous franchise, hundreds of outlets in Australia. And he said that. To me, it was like: wow." That was enough to commit to the market.

Pricing, Positioning, and Knowing Who Not to Sell To

Supy’s pricing has also evolved alongside its product. When Supy launched the new inventory management platform, Dani did not want to go back to the free model he was offering with the procurement approval software. However, Supy launched below market price, no annual commitments, no pressure, because the product wasn't complete enough to justify full market rates. As the platform matured and early bugs were resolved, Supy gradually increased pricing to reflect what he believes is a best-in-class product. "We are more complete than a lot of solutions out there, and better, and stronger, and more powerful, so we charge what the market charges."

Equally important is who they choose not to sell to. Customers who negotiate aggressively without seeing the value are filtered out. “They don’t see the ROI. That’s not a match.” Supy focuses on prospects with genuine buying intent and doesn’t push on those who don’t see high ROI.

Building the Team

Supy tripled in size last year. That kind of growth creates its own kind of chaos, and Dani doesn't pretend otherwise. There's no org chart. Senior hires are almost never parachuted in. Dani believes in growing from within, because outside hires often can't handle the pace of a company moving this fast. "If you ask me to draw an org chart, I don't have one," he says. "But what we're doing is working."

The management philosophy is deliberately lean. Dani believes AI is already beginning to replace middle management layers, and Supy has built a live sales intelligence coach that tells reps what they should have said, how to write a better email, and the likelihood of a deal closing depending on the approach. Curiosity and passion, not hierarchy, are what he wants from the team.

On the question of talent in the region, he pushes back on the conventional wisdom. "I disagree with talent in the region not being good enough. The talent in the region is excellent." The challenge isn't quality, it's speed. "I need someone yesterday. It's always I need someone yesterday." He’s given offers on the spot, sometimes at the end of the first interview. Not all of them worked out, but speed matters more than perfection. The reality is simple: the company is growing faster than it can hire, and recruiting has become one of its biggest bottlenecks.

The CEO is Always the CPO

Asked how his role has evolved, Dani's answer is almost contrarian: it hasn't. Just last week, he spent the entire weekend building product prototypes for Supy's next major feature set. "Same thing I used to do three years ago when we built the first version."

The scale has changed. The meetings are now with 50-location restaurant groups instead of five-store operators. But the core work remains the same: building product, selling, hiring, and figuring out the next milestone. “Some founders like to eventually hire a senior management layer under them to drive key decisions in the business,” Dani says. “But I believe a CEO is always going to be the CPO, at least until you decide to stop growing.”

For him, the reason is simple. Startups operate in constant uncertainty. While large corporations can map out ten-year strategies, venture-backed companies rarely know what the next six months will look like.

“Investors give you capital because they expect you to take risks,” he says. “They’re called venture capitalists for a reason.”

And those risks often require fast, instinct-driven decisions that only the founder can make. Hong Kong, for example, wasn’t even on Supy’s roadmap. But after signing a major customer there in September, the company decided by November to launch the entire market.

“It wasn’t in our business plan two months earlier,” Dani says. “That's the reality of startups. Those calls can only be made by the person steering the ship.”

The SVB Anecdote

If the pivot was the professional low point, the Silicon Valley Bank collapse was the emotional one. Supy had 100% of its funds sitting in SVB when the bank went under. "That was one week of stress that I never want to be reminded of," he says. Today, he runs four bank accounts, though he jokes that all of them are now threatening to close his accounts for inactivity.

What's Next: The Restaurant Brain

“Most software tells you what happened. Supy is building something categorically different: a system that acts before you ask.” Dani says.

That distinction matters because of what Supy has quietly assembled underneath the product, one of the most defensible operational datasets in the $3.5 trillion global food service industry. Every invoice processed, every recipe costed, every supplier negotiation, every menu decision: it flows through the platform and compounds. “This is not dashboard data. It's the kind of ground-truth, transaction-level signal that took years to accumulate and that no new entrant can replicate without earning the same operator trust from scratch.” Dani explains.

Now, Supy is weaponising it. The intelligence layer in development doesn't surface insights for humans to act on. It detects margin erosion before it materialises, triggers supplier substitutions before a shortage hits, and autonomously models menu structures against live cost data, closing the loop between intelligence and action with no manual step in between. The operators who use it won't manage their food costs. The system will.

The timing is deliberate. “AI didn't create this opportunity, Supy's data did. AI is simply the unlock that makes it executable now.” The wedge was always the operational layer: the procurement, the inventory, the supplier relationships. Intelligence is what that wedge was always pointing toward.

“The category we're defining has no incumbent. It isn't restaurant software. It isn't analytics. Its autonomous operations infrastructure, and the restaurant industry, still running on spreadsheets and gut instinct at scale, has no answer for it yet.”