About Palate Labs

An industry in crisis

The dining industry is in crisis.

Every week, restaurants that have been part of the fabric of their communities for decades close their doors for the last time, because the intelligence to connect them to the right diners has never existed.

On one side, diners cannot find restaurants that genuinely fit them, not for lack of options, but because no platform understands who they are, what they actually want, or what would make a meal genuinely right for them. The result is hours of searching, countless compromises, and experiences that fall consistently short of what they could have been. As a consequence, trust in dining out is eroding quickly. In the first three months of 2026 alone, 1.6 million UK adults stopped eating out altogether. Not because they stopped loving it. Because the experience stopped being worth the effort.

On the other side, restaurants have never had real-time demand data to inform their operations, making every consequential decision: what dishes to develop, which trends to get ahead of, and how to price their menus, a calculated guess at best. Weeks are spent developing dishes that customers never order, and when they don't sell, everything prepared for them goes to waste. This is not carelessness. This is what operating without demand data looks like. On margins this thin, it is the difference between a restaurant that survives and one that doesn't.

Finance, retail and logistics have run on real-time data for decades. Hospitality never has. Not because it is impossible, but because it has never existed. Palate Labs exists to be that intelligence infrastructure, connecting both sides of the industry for the first time.

Built to bridge both sides

Palate Labs is an AI-native dining intelligence infrastructure built to close the gap between diners unable to find the right restaurant and restaurants that have never had the intelligence to understand what their local market is actually demanding.

Maitra, our AI-powered dining concierge, specialises in personalising restaurant matches built around each diner's unique Taste DNA and contextual preferences, including budget, occasion and group. It handles the research, the reasoning and the booking entirely, freeing the diner to focus on enjoying the experience, not planning it. Every new user, interaction and match generates real-time diner behavioural data that flows directly into Palate Labs, showing restaurants what their market wants, who they are missing, and how to reach and retain them.

We turned subjective culinary experiences into measurable data, actively profiling every dish across every menu covering the entirety of London's dining ecosystem. At its core, Palate Labs is built on machine learning, powering the culinary encoding layer that captures flavour relationships, cooking methods and dietary signals, understanding what food actually is at culinary depth, not how it is described on a menu or rated in a review. Deep learning drives the matching engine, Taste DNA construction and behavioural learning. The same machine learning and deep learning infrastructure powers behavioural demand forecasting and personalisation. It learns from individual diner preferences and behavioural signals, identifies demand patterns before they surface anywhere else, and builds user profiles that sharpen continuously through interactions and usage.

While other platforms report on what already happened, Palate Labs surfaces demand before it shows up anywhere else. Restaurants on Palate anticipate their market rather than react to it. They see which dish trends and flavour profiles are gaining traction before the market has shifted. Menus reflect what diners are actively seeking, pricing adapts to what guests will genuinely pay, and service is prepared for who is walking through the door before they arrive.

As our dataset scales, every model in the system performs with greater precision across matching, demand forecasting and personalisation, translating directly into more actionable intelligence for every restaurant on the platform. Every restaurant that acts on more precise intelligence delivers better experiences. Better experiences bring more users to Maitra. Both sides reinforce each other continuously, and the system becomes more valuable to everyone on it with every interaction. The larger it grows, the harder it becomes to replicate, and the more indispensable it becomes to the industry it serves.

Beyond the brand

The world's greatest cities share one thing: a food culture built by the communities that made them. Every neighbourhood tells its unique story through its restaurants, and every restaurant is a living expression of the people who built it and the community that surrounds it. This is the soul of a city, not just its landmarks or its skyline, but its kitchens, its streets and the people who bring them to life.

The Turkish kitchen in Dalston that has fed its community for thirty years. The Jamaican restaurant in Brixton that has been at the heart of its neighbourhood for half a century. The family-run spot that only the locals know about but would be devastated to lose. These places carry cultures, traditions and memories that cannot be rebuilt once they are gone. When they close, communities lose far more than somewhere to eat.

Discovery has always rewarded spending over merit. The restaurants that get found are too often the ones that invested most in being seen, not necessarily the ones that best match what a diner is actually looking for. A restaurant's chance of reaching the right diner should be determined by how well its food, atmosphere and occasion genuinely fit, not by marketing expenditure. That is what Palate Labs is building toward: a system where every restaurant reaches the people it was made for.

Building the right foundation means accepting responsibility for what it changes. Our commitment to the industry and its communities extends across three areas.

Our commitments

The team

Mateus Lopes

Co-Founder / CEO

Le Cordon Bleu London graduate, Diplôme de Cuisine, Highest Honours. Diplôme de Culinary Management, Highest Honours. Six years across hospitality, including one, two and three-Michelin-starred kitchens internationally, training in how flavour, technique and composition work at the source. Representing founders who built dining intelligence from the kitchen up, Mateus brings expertise in flavour profiling and culinary encoding. His culinary framework is the data foundation behind Palate Labs' dish profiling and taste intelligence.

Michael Wilfert

Co-Founder / CTO

BSc Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison. International Business, Maastricht University. Built recommendation systems at Poison Pawn and Athlea before leading AI engineering teams at scale. Michael brings expertise in multi-modal agentic AI, preference prediction and full-stack architecture. His systems are the technical foundation of Palate Labs' intelligence infrastructure.

Cameron Nix

Founding Member, Head of AI and Applied Research

BSc Physiological Science, UCLA. MSc Software Engineering, Oxford, Distinction. Master's research applied directly to personalisation algorithms and AI systems for UK hospitality. Her taste-to-tensor matching engine and preference modelling architecture are the predictive core of Palate Labs' intelligence layer, built on reinforcement learning, neural recommendation systems and behavioural modelling.