Eon, Inc.

Aidan Chau

New York City, New York
Founder, Eon, Inc.
Founder & CEO, Maple

Eon is an AI platform that makes it easy for restaurant owners to navigate their POS data and draw digestible insights.

I went to Columbia University, where I did theoretical machine learning research. At a conference there, I met a startup called Air AI, which was working on voice AI for businesses. It was a cool application of what was then an emerging technology, and I joined them as a founding machine learning engineer and helped build out the initial version of their products. We were early in the space, and our infrastructure needs and costs didn’t exactly line up, making it tough to scale. So I left to start my first company, Eon, building AI tools for SMBs—inspired by challenges I was seeing family and friends navigate.

We’re Chinese immigrants, so lots of my family and close friends own Chinese restaurants. Restaurant owners have a million hair-on-fire problems all the time, and they really don’t have the time to dedicate to longer term issues or business strategy. At the same time, their point of sale (POS) systems have so much data that can inform a lot of critical businesses decisions, and reduce the number of those crises. POS systems—especially when we started—didn’t have any solutions to really help the restaurant owners leverage their data. We connected restaurants’ sales systems and existing databases and built an intuitive chat-based interface to make it easy for owners to navigate their data and draw digestible insights. We mainly distributed that service through a channel partnership with POS companies. One of those partner companies wanted it as a part of their product suite and acquired us.

Around the same time, I had been watching the voice AI space mature and was itching to get back into it. So after the acquisition, I went right into working on what became Maple—which is a voice AI solution for restaurants, salons, and retail shops.

The acquisition experience has been helpful for the success of Maple. Having gone through the experience, I was able to jump past some of the mistakes I had made the first time around. Resource-wise, the capital went straight into Maple, the earlier exit has been helpful for credibility with investors, and the acquiring company also invested a small stake into the new company. A lot of beneficial formal and informal relationships arose from the exit, too, which is helping us scale faster.