Restaurant Intelligence
Built by restaurant people, for restaurant people.
Donald Link runs some of the best restaurants in New Orleans. He's written cookbooks. He's been interviewed more times than he can count. But here's the thing that kept him up at night: he couldn't get a simple answer about his own restaurants without his team spending hours digging through spreadsheets.
Picture this. It's Tuesday afternoon. Chef needs to know how last week's specials performed across three locations. Simple question, right? Wrong. His team jumps between five different systems. They export data. They build spreadsheets. They cross-reference numbers. By the time they have an answer, it's Thursday. The moment has passed.
This happened constantly. Not just for specials. For everything. Labor costs. Tip distribution. Reservations. Every question meant hours of work. Every decision waited on data that lived in too many places.
So Chef called his friend Sam. Sam builds software. He's spent years making complex data feel simple for people who don't have time to learn new systems. Sam grew up around restaurants. His mom had one in France. He gets it.
Together, they built Rāi. One place for everything. Answers when you need them. Not when the spreadsheet is finally done.
Co-Founder | Executive Chef & Operator
Donald is a chef from Cajun Country who ended up running multiple restaurants in New Orleans. He's written cookbooks. He's been on TV. He's won awards. But none of that mattered when he needed to know something about his restaurants and had to wait days for an answer.
Chef Link is the kind of person who makes decisions fast. That's how you run restaurants. But every decision needed data. And getting that data meant his team jumping between systems, building spreadsheets, and creating reports. By the time he had what he needed, the opportunity was gone.
He got tired of waiting. So he decided to build something better. Something that would give him answers in minutes, not days. Something that spoke his language, not software language.
Co-Founder | Product Development & Technology
Sam builds software. He's spent years making complex data feel simple for people who just want to get their work done. With a background in marketing and design, he understands how people actually use software. His deep understanding of UX and UI design means the software he creates feels intuitive, not like work. He has a keen sense for listening to people's hurdles and building tools that actually solve their problems instead of adding to them.
He tinkers with stuff. He's not satisfied until he tweaks, iterates, and adjusts. He loves the challenge of taking complex tasks and building tools that render them simple.
When his friend Chef Link called with a problem, Sam recognized it immediately. Too much data. Too many systems. Too much time spent just trying to understand what's happening. He'd seen this before in other industries. The solution wasn't more features. It was making everything feel natural.
So they built Rāi. Not because they wanted to disrupt anything. But because they were tired of waiting for answers that should have been instant.
Co-Founder | Data Science & Software Engineering
Cort has been Sam's business partner for twenty years. Together, they've built software that handles massive amounts of data for the online marketing industry. The kind of software that processes billions of records without breaking a sweat.
Cort is a mad scientist when it comes to data infrastructure. He thinks in systems. He sees patterns in chaos. He builds things that scale. When most developers see a new feature request and start listing reasons why it's complicated, Cort sees possibilities. He's the rare developer who gets excited about new ideas instead of immediately calculating all the ways they could go wrong.
That's exactly what Rāi needed. Not just the technical expertise. But someone who says "let's figure it out" instead of "that's going to be hard." Cort is that person. He's built the infrastructure that makes Rāi fast, reliable, and ready to grow.
Together, the founding team combines deep restaurant operations with decades of experience building and scaling enterprise software.