The funding will help to scale a platform that empowers restaurants to enhance sales and tackle fraud.
Emilia AI has signed a funding round that includes a US$1M pre-seed investment agreement with Prosus Ventures and US$500K from a group of tech-focused angel investors.
Emilia's software connects to cameras restaurants already have, combining what it sees — table status, customer behavior, staff movement — with data from the point-of-sale system. The agents that power Emilia analyze and act in real-time. The result is a next-generation operating system that supports labor optimization, theft and fraud prevention, sales training, and even augmented control over the restaurant operations.
Founded in 2024 by Colombian entrepreneurs Andrés Cajiao (CEO) and Sebastian Rojo (CTO), Emilia was built for an industry with a chronic workforce problem. A typical bar or restaurant in Brazil replaces its entire staff roughly every 16 months – turnover above 70% a year, more than double the rest of the services sector.
The system’s coaching capability enables staff to increase their productivity and, as a result, their compensation. That, in turn, is expected to help reduce staff turnover as a whole.
Restaurant managers use Emilia to identify gaps or missed opportunities in the guest experience, as well as team performance and bottlenecks. The video analytics provide the management team with actionable and verifiable insights.
“We’re building the next generation of operating systems for restaurants. Our vision is to augment staff – not replace them. Our Coach agent will help waitstaff sell more, work smarter and get paid better for it,” said Cajiao.
A second Emilia agent, called Sentinel, offers an interface that turns the same cameras into a fraud prevention tool. It flags, for example, food that leaves the kitchen without being rung up or cash that doesn’t make it into the register.
“Most restaurants already have cameras, but the footage is only reviewed after something has gone wrong. Sentinel turns that footage into something an owner can act on the same day,” added Cajiao. “Ultimately, we built Emilia to be a restaurant owner's eyes on the ground, even when they're not there.”
Matheus Campos, Prosus Ventures, Head of Latam, said: "We see Emilia AI as a strategic bet to deepen AI integration across our entire ecosystem, but particularly in the foodservice sector where Prosus already has a strong footprint. Integrating Emilia’s technology provides a unique value-add for restaurant merchants and enhances point-of-sale capabilities. This will better position us to target Brazil's restaurant and foodservice sector, which is projected to be worth upwards of $75B in the not-too-distant future.”
The Sentinel agent allows managers to identify operational issues, turning hours of video recordings into actionable snippets that can be quickly reviewed and acted on.
The results so far are promising. At Alife Nino, a Brazilian restaurant group with 100+ locations, a pilot of Emilia drove a roughly 28x return on investment – about $300 in extra revenue per table each month against a system cost of about $10 per table. That return was driven largely by staff catching drink and dessert upsells they would otherwise have missed.
"More than the uplift in sales, for us the value is in the hospitality. What excites us about partnering with Emilia is using technology to make sure every detail of our guest experience is taken care of," said Pedro Silveira, Co-Founder and CEO of Alife Nino.
A pilot with iFood franchise client Jin Jin used Sentinel to identify fraud that had gone unnoticed, such as unauthorized stockroom visits and checkout numbers that didn't add up. The system turned 12 hours of security footage into a handful of incidents worth reviewing. Using Sentinel allowed the company operational control that was previously not possible, and are now scaling the solution to their 77+ locations.
The funding from Prosus Ventures will enable Emilia AI to continue developing its platform and expand across Brazil, where a large share of restaurants still operate with basic point-of-sale software, and into the wider Latin American market.
About Emilia AI
Founded in 2024, Emilia AI builds an AI layer on top of restaurants' existing security cameras, pairing footage with POS data to power real-time and analytical agents that care for the detail in the day-to-day to improve sales, reduce shrinkage, and optimize labor. Learn more at emiliavision.com.
About Prosus Ventures
Prosus Ventures is the early-stage investment arm of Prosus, a global consumer internet group whose ecommerce ecosystems in Latin America, Europe and India serve more than 1 billion customers. Prosus Ventures backs founders building the technologies that will shape Prosus's ecosystems over the next decade. It invests off Prosus's own balance sheet rather than third-party fund capital. Since 2015, we've deployed $2.3B+ across 100+ startups, in 20 countries globally.
About Prosus
Prosus is the power behind the world’s leading lifestyle ecommerce brands, across Europe, India, and Latin America, unlocking an AI-first world for our 2 billion customers.
The Prosus technology ecosystem spans food delivery, payments, classifieds, travel, events, and mobility. Our integrated approach enhances user engagement and creates the foundation for unprecedented AI capabilities through proprietary data and cross-service intelligence.
Through Prosus Ventures, we invest in companies which inspire and support the Prosus ecosystem. We search for new opportunities at the leading edge of AI and ecommerce, the digital AI workforce and in frontier technologies, such as robotics, drones and synbio.
The team actively backs exceptional entrepreneurs who are using technology to improve people’s everyday lives.
To find out more, please visit www.prosus.com.
