Palona AI has closed its Series A funding round, bringing its total funding to $20 million, including converted SAFE notes. The round includes backing from Ardenwood Ventures, CrimsonOx, UpHonest, Turbo, Llama Ventures, Neo, Fusion Fund, Defy, and Maynard Webb, alongside other institutional, strategic and individual investors.
The company is launching what it describes as a multimodal AI operating layer for physical businesses, starting with restaurants and planning to expand into other brick-and-mortar industries.
Palona’s platform connects customer demand, real-time operational data and automated actions. Its initial product suite focuses on three areas:
- Revenue expansion: Capturing phone calls, catering requests, private events and large-order opportunities.
- Revenue intelligence: Identifying customer intent, value and urgency for operators.
- Operations excellence: Turning live operational signals into actions for restaurant teams.
The technology is already deployed with restaurant groups including Din Tai Fung, Mountain Mike’s Pizza, Giordano’s, Rooted Hospitality and Cali BBQ.
“Physical businesses need AI that can understand what is happening and act in real time,” Maria Zhang, founder and CEO of Palona AI, said in a press release. “Palona turns demand, operational context and live signals into actions that drive revenue, quality and execution.”
“Before Palona, calls we couldn’t answer represented demand we couldn’t capture,” Shawn Walchef, CEO of Cali BBQ, said in the release. “Now we’re converting more of those conversations into orders and identifying catering opportunities we previously had no dedicated process to manage. For an operator, that’s where AI becomes real. It creates measurable revenue while helping the team execute better.”
Palona reported early traction from a production study covering three brands, where its system processed 481 orders across 194 location-days and identified 305 large-order and catering inquiries across seven restaurants. At Cali BBQ, which has used Palona for more than a year, Father’s Day revenue increased 20% year over year, while Palona became the chain’s highest-average-order-value channel as it expanded into catering and large orders.
Founded and led by CEO Maria Zhang, Palona is also developing what it calls an “Interaction Model for Physical AI”, designed to understand relationships between people, objects, locations and processes over time rather than simply detecting objects or describing scenes.
