What's Cooking

Palate Labs won the Northeastern Prototype Award, an accolade for the most promising ventures within the Northeastern University ecosystem. The first of many!

Palate Labs became the first student-led venture formally invited to the Northeastern University London Startup Hub without an external nomination. A professional workspace in the heart of London, steps from the City's financial district, the hub provides a base for the team and direct access to Northeastern's global network of faculty, researchers, and industry connections.

Palate Labs was selected for the Innovate UK Business Growth Programme, backed by the UK's national innovation agency and part of UK Research and Innovation, the body responsible for driving Britain's scientific and technological advancement. The programme provides intensive, one-to-one coaching across commercial strategy, investment readiness, and international market expansion, connecting Palate Labs to Innovate UK's national and international partner network, including Enterprise Europe Network.

Apify powers the data extraction infrastructure behind Palate Labs' proprietary dataset, the engine that extracts and profiles restaurant and menu data across London at scale. Following an initial meeting with the Palate Labs team, Apify proactively upgraded our account and established a dedicated support channel, citing their excitement about the vision and the co-marketing opportunities ahead. This is not a standard programme relationship. It is a partnership built on shared belief in what Palate Labs is building.

MongoDB is the document database at the foundation of Palate Labs' data architecture, storing the taste profiles, restaurant intelligence, and behavioural data that feeds the matching algorithm directly. Its flexible, document-based structure is suited to the complexity of culinary data, where no two diner profiles are alike. Joining the MongoDB for Startups programme provides the infrastructure backing and technical community to scale this data layer as Palate Labs grows.

Palate Labs was designated as a Pioneer Venture through Northeastern University's Venture Mentoring Network, selected by specialists at Traction5 for intensive mentoring and strategic guidance. Through Northeastern's global network, the programme connects Palate Labs with industry experts across sectors and geographies.

Palate Labs was selected as one of Google Cloud UK's top priority startups for 2026, a designation extended to a small number of companies across the UK. The programme provides direct access to Google Cloud infrastructure spanning AI, storage, and data analysis, AI proof-of-concept support from Google's engineering and partner teams, and go-to-market guidance as we scale from development to production.

Pinecone is the vector database at the core of Palate Labs' matching infrastructure. Every dish and restaurant in our dataset is encoded as a vector embedding and stored in Pinecone. When a diner's taste profile is processed, our matching model queries Pinecone by semantic similarity across the full dataset, returning the restaurants and dishes that match who they are as a diner rather than relying on keywords or generic categories. Pinecone also powers our semantic search layer across reviews and editorial sources, giving the system contextual intelligence beyond menu data alone.