Our investment in EZee Assist
Improving franchise operations with AI
We are excited to announce our investment in EZee Assist
EZee Assist is improving franchise operations by using artificial intelligence to better support franchisees by surfacing the right information in the right format at the right time.
Why bother improving franchise operations?
When most people think of franchises they think of the large Quick Service Restaurant like McDonald's but the franchise model is used extensively across much of the service sectors (e.g. Remax),retail sectors (e.g. Orange Theory Fitness), and many other industries.
1 in 7 multi-unit businesses globally are franchises, with 1 million franchises in North America employing 11m people and accounting for over $1 trillion in GDP.
Franchisees purchase into a franchise system which comprises a brand, a territory to serve, and operational process and knowledge. Over time the operational knowledge gets spread across multiple platforms. This fragmentation of knowledge leads to increased support costs for the franchisors, less time on improving the overall system, and frustration for franchisees who have to spend time searching for the answer to their questions.
EZee Assist's vision
EZee Assist’s long-term vision is to provide the right information at the right time to franchisees. Moving from franchisees pulling information to pro-actively receiving information that provides insight on what actions they can take to improve their businesses operational or strategic results. They may also move beyond franchise locations as early indication is that hub-and-spoke businesses experience the same difficulties in obtaining timely information.
EZee Assist has the right experience to build and sale the product
The founding team of Rapheal Rajan, Shray Mehra, Gabriel Cadamuro, and Jason Kealey came together over several months and are uniquely positioned to solve this problem.
Raphael and Shray are long-time friends with a history of solving business problems and helping start-ups. Raphael is an Industrial Engineer who has worked extensively with global organizations as a management consultant. Shray had previously spent 8 years helping start-ups at Creative Destruction Labs and Antler. They met Gabriel at Antler and started building the solution to the problem together. Gabriel is a machine learning researcher and programmer who has spent his career finding ways for data to provide the right information at the right time. The final piece of the co-founding team was Jason who EZee Assist met while doing customer development. Jason brings industry expertise as he has built and exited his own franchise technology company, FranchiseBlast. In that time he supported tens of thousands of locations across over 100+ franchise brands.
What is next?
EZeeAssist is already live with several customers including BeaverTails, Real Property Management, and several others. They are now focused on growing their customer base and expanding their service offering.
N49P x EZee Assist
N49P is thrilled to announce that it led the pre-seed round with participation from 10VC, Antler Canada, Hustle Fund, and Canadian super angels Ajay Agrawal, Chen Fong, Jenny Yang, and franchising executive Dan Monaghan. If you want to learn more about the round you can read more here or if you want to learn more about EZeeAssist you can check them out here.