Sinatra, a Scottsdale-based tech startup that aims to revolutionize the hospitality industry with its all-in-one app, said it has raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding as the company continues work on development and the unfolding launch of its software products.
The money came from a mix of Arizona-based hospitality investors and San Francisco angel investors, the company said through a spokesperson.
The company was founded by 19-year-old Adam Laor — who despite his young age is already a serial entrepreneur — together with Brian Pierce, who has been in the hospitality industry for more than two decades, including stints at The Phoenician and the Four Seasons Resorts & Hotels.
Right now, the startup is offering Sinatra Training, which facilitates continuous digital training for staff, allowing employers to upload material and employees to access it through the app. It’s already available for Apple devices and will soon be accessible for Android customers as well, the company said.
The training component is just the start for the company, whose goal is to keep expanding services for the industry. In the first quarter of 2023, plans call for the addition of bottle recognition, allowing for automated digital reordering; a safety feature that uses gesture recognition and liquid detection to help prevent falls; and a feature to make food pickups faster by syncing prep times with customers’ real-time arrival estimates.
“The mission of Sinatra is to build a single platform for hospitality that is simple, convenient, efficient and cost effective,” Laor said in a statement. “We realized that hospitality needed left and right brains on the founding teams of hospitality tech companies. Sinatra is a result of that collaboration.”
Sinatra’s founders said they’ve partnered with Bar & Restaurant Insurance, Arizona’s largest bar and restaurant underwriter, Arizona Liquor Industry Consultants, Southern Glazers Wine & Spirits and Illinois Casualty Cos.
Laor was one of the honorees of 2021’s inaugural AZ Inno Under 25 awards featuring startups founded by Valley residents younger than 25. The 2022 installment of the awards, announced just last month, can be found here.
Laor has also founded RiviverBlasts, a herbal supplement brand, at age 16, and developed a product to alleviate congestion, called Sinus Aid. He also, while still in high school, helped build Town Pharmacy, an independent pharmacy in New York City.
Pierce, during his time in the hospitality industry, has worked in employee relations and is the founder of the True Salt brand as well as WinePhD, the first wine app available via iPhone.
The company began with an idea to use software to speed up restaurant pick-up lines, but the founders said they quickly realized they could do more than that.
Laor and Pierce started working together on a ghost kitchen project in Gilbert where food could be ordered in advance and picked up each night. That effort ended with the realization that traffic jams would be a problem, which led the two to start working on how to make pickups more efficient and also bring more tools to the hospitality industry in a single platform.
Sinatra was founded in Tempe, but the company has since moved its headquarters to Scottsdale, a bit to the north. The company now has eight employees, a spokesperson said.
In addition to running Sinatra, Laor last year said he was working on another project called the JamPad, a group for entrepreneurs, engineers and creatives to come together and swap ideas.
Laor moved to Arizona from New York in 2020. He said the density of young people and engineering talent around ASU is what drew him to the desert.
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