A restaurant’s phone rings hundreds of times a week. Each unanswered call means a table left empty or an order unplaced. For decades, that simple problem has cost the hospitality industry millions. Three young founders, Gurveer Singh, Isaac Tom Nichols, and Adam Gamieldien, decided to change that. Their startup, Certus AI, turns the phone line into a living system that takes orders, answers questions, and never puts a customer on hold.
The idea traces back to Gurveer Singh’s family restaurant, where he started answering phones at just nine years old. Growing up, he saw how many orders were lost simply because no one could pick up in time. What most owners accepted as an unavoidable cost, he recognized as an opportunity to rebuild how restaurants operate.
Together with Isaac Tom Nichols, whose engineering precision transformed the concept into a functioning system, and Adam Gamieldien, who focuses on go-to-market, the team developed a voice agent capable of handling reservations, orders, and inquiries automatically without compromising the human touch of hospitality.
What started with one ringing phone has grown into a network of restaurants using Certus AI to recover thousands in revenue a day. The trio’s goal is simple: Replace the restaurant phone line with Voice AI.
The Engineer, The Builder, and The Strategist
Every startup has its mix of engineering depth, go-to-market firepower, and execution, and Certus is no different.
Isaac built the intelligence that makes Certus work in any restaurant, no matter how complex the menu or unique the operation. He engineered the systems that prevent hallucinations, understand context, and adapt to how each restaurant actually runs — whether it’s a pizzeria with custom toppings or a sushi bar with rotating specials. His focus has always been reliability over flash, building something restaurants can trust to sound right, act right, and never break in the middle of a rush.
Adam drives growth and go-to-market. In an industry flooded with tools that promise efficiency but rarely deliver profit, he’s focused on results. “Restaurants don’t need another dashboard,” he says. “They need something that actually makes them money.” With Certus, operators are saving $80,000 to $100,000 a year in lost revenue from missed calls, real dollars back into the business, not theoretical automation gains.
Then there is Gurveer, who saw the problem first. He grew up answering phones in his parents’ restaurant from the age of nine, watching customers hang up every night because no one could reach the phone in time. Barely out of his teens, he convinced investors and industry veterans that small restaurants deserve the same sophistication as corporate chains. His leadership blends realism with vision. He often reminds his team that their success depends on helping one restaurant owner at a time. That conviction has kept Certus AI grounded even as it scaled into Y Combinator, the same accelerator that nurtured global household names like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Instacart.
A Quiet Revolution in Plain Sight
The impact of their work isn’t measured by headlines or venture rounds but by the quiet hum of restaurants that no longer miss a sale. Their technology acts like a virtual front-of-house manager, answering every call instantly, taking orders, and routing them straight into the restaurant’s POS system, whether that’s Toast, Square, Clover, or Lightspeed. For large chains, Certus helps maintain quality control and consistency across dozens of locations while insulating operations from staff churn. For independent restaurants, it’s a profit-recovery engine – capturing missed orders and putting $80K to $100K a year back into the business.
Underneath that simplicity lies a system that provides independent restaurants with the kind of technology once only available to billion-dollar chains like Domino’s. Big brands spend millions on R&D to make sure every call, order, and delivery runs perfectly, but most local restaurants don’t have that luxury. Certus levels the field. Its infrastructure quietly handles the same complexity: menus, modifiers, integrations, and rush-hour chaos without the need for a tech team. What used to take months and millions can now be set up in hours.
What makes it work is empathy. The founders understand that restaurants run on human connection, the warmth of service, the rhythm of a busy kitchen, and the regular who calls in every Friday night. Certus doesn’t replace that; it protects it. By removing the chaos of missed calls and overwhelmed staff, the technology gives restaurants back what matters most: time for their customers.
A New Standard of Confidence
Few startups earn the trust of both engineers and restaurant owners. Certus AI has done so by speaking both languages fluently. Adam’s go-to-market insight gave the company its commercial lift; Isaac’s precision made the product resilient; Gurveer’s persistence made it real. Together, they represent a new kind of leadership, technical enough to build, practical enough to serve, and mature enough to stay focused when attention drifts elsewhere.
Their journey speaks to a quiet truth in technology: the best systems make themselves invisible. When a restaurant runs smoothly, customers never notice the infrastructure beneath it. That, the trio says, is the point.
Behind every meal served on time, there’s a silent network of calls answered, orders processed, and staff relieved of one more distraction. Certus AI turned that invisible effort into measurable progress. In doing so, Singh, Nichols, and Gamieldien didn’t simply build a company; they changed how an entire industry communicates, one phone call at a time.
