Founders Everywhere: Assaf Stizki
Assaf Stizki is the co-founder and CEO of Restoke, the AI-powered restaurant management platform that coordinates teams and simplifies operations.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Restaurants run on a chaotic buffet of scattered information. There are staff schedules, food orders, sales systems, and kitchen operations all sitting in different places. As a result, many owners end up making critical calls based on their gut feeling alone. Restoke is building the AI restaurant manager to give operators real-time insights and business guidance so they can spot risks and make informed decisions. The platform started as a basic operational layer that has grown into a full AI-driven recommendation and guidance system built specifically for the realities of running and scaling a restaurant business. Restoke works with everything from single-location restaurants to large multi-unit chains, including one customer that scaled from 27 locations to 120 with Restoke’s operational backbone in place.
Co-founder and CEO Assaf Stizki has been in the restaurant industry for over two decades across Europe, Australia, and the US. After a rollercoaster career spanning multiple corners of the restaurant industry, it was scaling into franchising that exposed just how fragile restaurant operations really are. There are manuals that aren’t followed, systems break down, and consistency becomes almost impossible. That frustration led him to hack together his own operational system. Around the same time he met his future co-founder and CTO Ken Brand, a mathematician with a background in machine learning. They met through a series of restaurant events that Assaf hosted. They are both self described “foodies” and quickly bonded over exploring restaurants together. They realized they could combine Assaf’s operational experience with Ken’s technical expertise to turn Assaf’s solution into a scalable AI platform: Restoke.
What’s Restoke’s North Star?
Our North Star is simple: help our customers scale with confidence. If we can take a restaurant group from a few locations to dozens or even hundreds by giving them the systems to maintain operational consistency, protect margins, optimize profitability, and replicate what works, that’s success. Our goal is to be the backbone that makes expansion predictable, efficient, and repeatable.
How does Restoke inspire “customer love”?
Customers love that they don’t have to dig through endless, fragmented data just to make a basic decision. Hospitality is chaotic: POS systems, scheduling tools, managers, kitchen chaos; it’s a constant motion. We pull those signals together and turn them into clear, real‑time insights. We tell you, “You’ve got a $6,000 risk ahead of you, here’s why, and here’s what to do.” That ability to see trends, protect margins, and make sensible decisions about next week instead of relying on “gut feeling” is what resonates most.
What’s on the horizon for Restoke?
We’re building what we see as a new category: the AI restaurant manager. It’s an intelligence layer that works both at the individual location and at HQ, supporting day‑to‑day decisions and strategic planning across the whole group. The goal is for Restoke to feel like a trusted manager that never sleeps.
How has your background influenced you as a founder?
I grew up in a Mediterranean, Middle Eastern family where food was the center of everything. Both my grandmothers were incredible cooks, and holidays and gatherings revolved around eating. In my early twenties I decided to turn that love of food into a career, moved to Europe, and worked insane hours in hospitality, chasing the romantic idea of restaurants and creativity. Later I moved to Australia with my wife, worked for some truly bad operators who taught me everything I didn’t want to replicate, and then started building my own concepts: caterings, farmers’ markets, brick‑and‑mortar restaurants, and now Restoke.
Any favorite podcasts?
I’m a big fan of the podcast TRIGGERnometry with Konstantin Kisin.
Fun fact:
I love a good burger; it’s what drives me. I honestly don’t care much about having a fancy car or house; what excites me is finding or helping create the perfect burger.
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